GAINESVILLE, Texas — North Central Texas College closed out 2025 with a string of funding wins and partnerships that, taken together, point to where the Gainesville-based community college is investing for the next several years: skilled trades, healthcare, leadership development, and student support.
The headline number is $2.84 million in state workforce grants. The supporting moves — a banking partnership for the Red River Promise and a leadership development partnership with Grayson College — are smaller in dollar terms but signal NCTC's strategy of using regional collaboration to multiply what a single community college can do alone.
$2.375M for robotics, mechatronics, and allied health
The largest award is a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) Texas Reskilling and Upskilling Education (TRUE) grant totaling more than $2.375 million.
The funding is targeted at high-demand programs in electrical, industrial mechatronics, automation, and robotics, with an additional expansion of allied health offerings. These are exactly the categories where Dallas-Fort Worth manufacturers and healthcare systems have been signaling skill shortages — the kind of programs that benefit most from hands-on training with industry-standard equipment.
The TRUE program is the state's flagship vehicle for funding workforce-aligned community college expansion. NCTC's award reflects its growing role as a pipeline for North Texas employers as the metroplex's industrial base shifts toward higher-tech manufacturing.
$331,656 for nursing, $131,838 for a high school welding pipeline
A second round of state funding came through the Texas Workforce Commission's Jobs and Education for Texans (JET) program.
NCTC received $331,656 to support its registered nursing program. The grant lands at a time when North Texas hospitals are reporting persistent RN staffing gaps, and Texas as a whole is projected to face a multi-decade nursing shortage as the population ages.
In a related JET award, Forestburg ISD received $131,838 for a welding program run in partnership with NCTC in Gainesville. The model — high school students earning industry certifications while still in school, using equipment funded through state grants — is exactly the dual-enrollment pipeline JET was designed to encourage. Students can step out of high school with welding credentials already in hand, which shortens the path into manufacturing and construction jobs that have been hard for employers to fill.
Banking on the Red River Promise: $25K over five years
The Red River Promise — NCTC's tuition-free pathway for eligible students — got a new fundraising arm in early November.
The Banking on the Red River Promise Program is a five-year initiative with local banks to raise $25,000 in additional student support funds. Unlike the state grants, which mostly fund equipment and program capacity, the bank-raised dollars are meant to cover the costs that quietly knock students out of school: textbooks, transportation, childcare, and the kind of unexpected expenses that working adults can't always absorb.
The Promise itself already covers tuition. The banking partnership is an admission that tuition is rarely the binding constraint — what keeps students from finishing is everything else.
North Texas Gateway Program: a leadership pipeline with Grayson
The last announcement of the cycle was a partnership with Grayson College — based in Denison — to launch the North Texas Gateway Program, aimed at developing the next generation of community college administrators.
Leadership pipelines are an unsexy but increasingly urgent issue across Texas community colleges, where a wave of veteran administrators is approaching retirement. The Gateway Program is designed to give current faculty and staff a structured path into executive roles, drawing on the combined strengths of two institutions that already collaborate on workforce development, transfer agreements, and resource sharing.
Neither school has released application details or program timelines publicly. Both are expected later as implementation moves forward.
What it adds up to
Looked at as separate announcements, the late-2025 grants and partnerships read as routine community college news. Looked at together, they trace a strategy:
- Skilled trades and allied health as the core workforce play, funded mostly by state grants that pay for equipment and program capacity
- Wraparound student support funded by local employers — banks here, but the same model could extend to other industries
- Regional partnerships with Grayson and Forestburg ISD that let NCTC offer programs and pipelines that no single institution could build alone
NCTC serves students from Cooke, Denton, and surrounding counties through campuses in Gainesville, Denton, Corinth, and Flower Mound, plus online. Application information for the nursing program and other career and technical education tracks is at nctc.edu. Information about supporting the Red River Promise is at nctc.edu/promise.