This article presents an overview of the rapidly shifting CTE economic and policy environments in response to a new wave of federal legislation affecting how community colleges create and deliver CTE programs. The authors offers three exemplars of community colleges in rural, suburban, and urban service areas that have successfully aligned CTE programs with local labor market demand.
This report from Abt Associates gauges progress in implementing the Professional Training Corps (PTC), which is an adaptation of Year Up’s core program for college settings. The study identified a need for PTC program improvement strategy and how randomized controlled trials can be used in improvement research.
Developed by the CTE Research Network’s Equity in CTE Workgroup, the framework illustrates how researchers can infuse an intentional focus on equity into research from start to finish. The framework addresses equity at six stages of the research life cycle and includes real and hypothetical examples from CTE research as well as a companion checklist and thematic overview.
This working paper from Annenberg Brown University examines cost data to compare average costs per pupil in standalone high school CTE programs in Connecticut and Massachusetts to the most likely counterfactual schools. Programs in Massachusetts offer clear positive returns on investment, whereas programs in Connecticut offer smaller, though mostly non-negative expected returns.
High school career and technical education (CTE) and college preparation are often treated as mutually exclusive rather than as integrated, symbiotic tracks. This two-year case study examined 16 juniors enrolled in a CTE high school and how they perceived their college and career aspirations.
This report from Georgia State University examines career and technical education (CTE) participation, graduation, and postsecondary outcomes for students with different identified disabilities in Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Washington.
Linkage Between Fields of Concentration in High School Career-Technical Education and College Majors
This working paper from the Calder National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research examines the extent to which four cohorts of high school graduates in Kentucky persisted in and attained postsecondary credentials in their chosen CTE fields of concentration in high school. Findings indicate that relative to students with similar achievement prior to high school, as measured by grades and test scores, CTE concentration in high school is strongly associated with students being more likely to enroll in a two-year college and less likely to enroll in a four-year college.
This article in Washington Monthly describes the encouraging success of the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) model, a nonselective dual enrollment program that serves primarily lower-income students of color. The article highlights the program's use in Dallas Independent School District in Texas and references the study that a team at MDRC is conducting as part of our Network to evaluate the New York City P-TECH high schools.