Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Vocational training, also known as Career Technical Education (CTE), is a focus for state and federal policy efforts to improve economic outcomes for students who do not pursue four-year college degrees. While some sub-baccalaureate vocational credentials confer immediate returns upon completion (e.g. associate degree in nursing), many others – most often certificates that require less time to complete than an associate degree – do not provide students with significant gains. One way to improve outcomes among students who complete shorter-term, less valuable credentials is to provide pathways that allow students to return to school, receive additional training, and earn or “stack” another credential along a career ladder.

Across vocational programs in California’s community colleges, career pathways take many forms, but little is known about which yield the best results for student completion and labor market returns. Some career pathways require students to stack progressively longer, more demanding credentials over time, while other fields of study are more conducive to students combining credentials of similar length or difficulty towards a portfolio or “modular” approach. Considering the renewed state and federal push to create more career pathway programs, understanding the efficacy of various approaches to skill building is paramount.

Our analysis utilizes detailed, student-level longitudinal data from California’s Community College Chancellor’s Office covering the period from 2000 – 2016 to assess training pathways across several vocational fields (e.g. IT, business, child development, engineering) and examine factors related to successful completion of pathways that result in CTE credentials with high-labor market value. We employ two different strategies to identify opportunities to stack credentials – one that is data-driven and relies on analysis of awards students actually earn, the other is qualitative and uses information gathered from course catalogs, web searches, and interviews. In this way, we detail the prevalence of specific pathways in which students are actually completing stackable credentials, but also capture elements of program design and intention.

To examine factors related to student success, we build on previous work focused on health training pathways that uses a comparison group of non-completers to identify program factors (e.g. credential lengths, career pathway design) and student choices (e.g. course-taking behavior and utilization of support programs) related to successful outcomes, controlling for a rich set of individual demographic characteristics (and, where possible, employment and wage level). The comparison group of non-completers is comprised of students who return to complete additional training (sufficient units in a narrow program of study) along an identified pathway signaling their intention to stack credentials. Though not causal estimates, these results will point to program and student practices that are most highly related to successful outcomes.

Our findings identify especially fruitful combinations of CTE credentials as well as factors (e.g. program design, student supports) that hold promise for increasing the effectiveness of career pathways in CTE areas. We also provide insights into how well CTE training pathways work for disadvantaged student groups – the target of many efforts to improve both student outcomes and economic disparities.