Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Career and Technical Education (CTE) is enjoying renewed interest among policymakers and researchers, in part because the movement away from “college for all” and toward “college and career readiness” has strengthened the connections between high school, college, and the labor market. This resurgence is buttressed by the recent reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, the principal federal education program supporting secondary and postsecondary CTE. The new law, which awards $1 billion to states, goes into effect in July 2019. In addition to calling for strengthened connections between STEM education and CTE, the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act aims to better “align workforce skills with labor market needs” through a competitive grant program. The reauthorization of Perkins is a component of the Administration’s larger “strategy of empowering American workers” to meet the “skills crisis” facing the nation.

The rising tide of interest in CTE has been accompanied by a wave of empirical research that has linked participation in it to a range of positive educational and labor market outcomes. Yet the conditions under which CTE achieves these results remain poorly understood. In particular, no study has examined the extent to which a fundamental goal of the extant Perkins law is being met--that is, the degree to which CTE coursetaking in high school aligns with the demands of the local labor market. This is critical not only because of its obvious importance to the broader CTE community, but also to federal lawmakers who required that state grantees demonstrate alignment between high school CTE and the local labor market as a condition of receiving Perkins funds. The current study addresses this gap in the literature. More specifically, the current study establishes a novel link between two extant data sources (the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:2009) published by the National Center for Education Statistics and publicly available Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to ascertain the degree to which (1) CTE coursetaking in high school aligns with U.S. and regional market demand, (2) these relationships vary by CTE career cluster, and, lastly, (3) national and regional market demand predict CTE cluster area concentration. Robust linear probability model estimates with school fixed effects revealed that, in most CTE cluster areas, CTE coursetaking was positively associated with increased rates of employment in a student’s proximal geographical area. Average annual CTE cluster wages were, on the other hand, most often associated with decreased CTE coursetaking. There was no evidence to suggest that the links between CTE coursetaking and market characteristics interacted differentially with gender and socioeconomic status. The authors report a number of policy implications based on these and other empirical findings.