Texas State Technical College-Harlingen

The Texas State Technical College-Harlingen, known as the Rio Grande Campus, began operations in November 1967 as an extension of the Waco campus of the Texas State Technical Institute on the old Harlingen Air Force Base and in various city-owned buildings. There were two instructors and forty students. In 1969 the campus was separated from Texas A&M University, and its name became Texas State Technical Institute-Harlingen. The school had grown to a student body of 1,262 by 1974. In 1983 a campus center was added in McAllen. In 1991 the school was renamed the Texas State Technical College-Harlingen. It held accreditations and memberships with the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, the Association of Texas Colleges and Universities, and the Committee on Allied Health Education and Accreditation in Cooperation with the Council on Education of the AMRA. It was located on a 112-acre campus and had twenty-two instructional buildings. The McAllen site had forty-four acres and six buildings. Twenty-nine programs of study were offered in Harlingen and eleven in McAllen. Both the associate in applied science degree and the certificate of completion were offered. The Harlingen campus library held 16,000 volumes. The facility specialized in adult and continuing education, apprenticeship education, industrial plant startup and expansion, and various conferences and workshops. J. Gilbert Leal was president of the school. Harlingen had a faculty of 141 and McAllen 29. There were 2,623 students enrolled in 1991.