Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Effective Career Pathways at Community Colleges

(Education)

Throughout the country, policymakers have renewed support for career technical, or vocational, education (CTE). The 2014 Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act revised federal legislation on large-scale workforce training investment, better engaging community colleges and placing special emphasis on career pathways. Several states have also passed legislation and made sizable investments in the past few years focused on CTE training in their public, 2-year higher education systems. For example, in California, in addition to voter-approved increases in funding for the state’s community colleges, recent budget proposals increase CTE funding by an additional $1 billion compared to previous budgets. The most proximate tie between post-secondary training and the labor market, CTE promises opportunities for short-term investment (or re-investment) in human capital tied to specific in-demand careers. Further, certain CTE pathways may allow students to stack multiple credentials and in so doing move up a career ladder – education’s upward mobility mechanism in action. However, despite the promise of CTE pathways, much remains unknown. Research has identified sizeable labor market returns to obtaining a career technical credential (Backes et al, 2014; Dadgar and Trimble, 2014; Huff Stevens et al, 2015; Jepsen et al, 2014). But evidence points to wide variation in returns across programs and across student groups. Furthermore, completion rates are dismally low for CTE credentials. If vocational training is to be a mechanism for upward mobility for more students, we need to better understand which pathways are most promising and how student characteristics or behaviors contribute to successful outcomes. Many students at community college have prior work experience, attempt multiple degrees, and/or engage with training programs specifically tied to employer needs. All of these facts point to the importance of identifying successful CTE career pathways in the community college system. This panel examines the issues in providing and expanding CTE career pathways within public community colleges from diverse perspectives. A number of the papers in this session utilize proprietary, student-level data from state community college systems, which is difficult to obtain and can provide key lessons for policymakers nationwide. Two papers consider the growth in demand for stackable credentials, awards that are designed (or hypothesized) to help students explicitly take steps along a career pathway. A third paper examines the labor market returns to a registered nursing degree using variation from a lottery that determines admission. The fourth paper focuses on competition between for-profit and community colleges by exploiting a regulatory change to examine how the two systems respond differently to increases in demand for occupational education.