Made in America

Henry Reyes, at center, is a 2006 graduate of the academy who is now an inspector at Chromalloy Component Services, a CGTC subsidiary in San Antonio. Academy students earn college credits in their last two years of high school.

—Alicia Wagner Calzada

A program that lets high school juniors and seniors earn college credit while training for hightech manufacturing jobs faces a shortage of interested students.

By Scott J. Cech

San Antonio

In a cavernous machine shop southwest of downtown, Robert I. Rayburn was bent over a lathe earlier this month, shaving thin twists of metal from a solid block of aluminum spinning in the machine.

“When I graduate, I want to do stuff like this,” said the 17-year-old high school junior, pushing up his safety glasses and gesturing at the rows of metalworking machines on the concrete floor. “Machinists are in big demand.”

In this age of offshored labor, aspiring to a job in manufacturing sounds almost quaint. Didn’t all those jobs disappear to China...