I have said it before, and I will say it again: college isn't for everyone. The fact that the college dropout rate is nearly half in the United States reaffirms that notion. Not everyone was cut out for a four-year college, but that doesn't mean those individuals are doomed to mediocre economic well-being. This is where career and technical education (CTE) enters the scene.
As the Brooking Institution's primer explains, CTE is a vocational education in secondary schools that dates back to 1917. The purpose of CTE is to prepare students with skills that are in high demand in the labor market while simultaneously preparing them for a post-secondary degree program in a technical field. CTE can include career-oriented classwork, internships, and apprenticeships. The premise of CTE is to provide those who were not bound for the traditional four-year college to have enough skills and training to be attractive enough upon graduation (or at the most, after a two-year, post-secondary degree). While CTE started to decline in the 1980s, it made a comeback this decade. It has become all the rage now as young adults try to find a lucrative alternative to the four-year college degree.
The idea behind CTE seems intuitive enough: provide people with an alternative so they do not have to live a life of squalor or constantly have to struggle economically. How has CTE fared so far? As the Brooking Institution illustrates, the amount of research on CTE is extremely limited. Some research shows success in terms of higher high school graduation rates, attendance at a two-year college, employment rates, and wages (e.g., Doughtery, 2018). Some research is mixed, such as the research that shows that while CTE helps with high school dropout rates and graduation rates, it doesn't help with college attendance rates (Gottfield and Stratte Plasman, 2017). There has been some academic literature from Stanford criticizing CTE, suggesting that CTE students have diminished earnings later in life because they are less able to adapt to the labor market when it changes (Hanushek et al., 2017). The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) adds to the research that questions CTE's success. Earlier this month, AEI released its CTE report, entitled The Evolution of Career and Technical Education: 1982-2013.
What AEI's report does is cast some doubt on the overall success of CTE. The report segments the students by two main types: Traditional Vocational course takers and New Era course takers. Traditional Vocational courses include such subjects as construction and manufacturing, whereas New Era is more of the Computer Sciences and Engineering. In aggregate, average test scores and graduation rates are improving for CTE concentrators. On the other hand, when you look at Traditional Vocational course takers as a segmentation of the CTE course takers, they are not doing so well.
The shift from Traditional Vocational courses to New Era courses shows that vocational education is less focused on the academically weaker than it has ever been. What the AEI report is suggesting is that the aggregate data are hiding the problem of vocational education, mainly that it is not adequately helping the students that it was meant to help. As long as there is a population of academically disinclined students, vocational education (and its successor, CTE) is going to have the challenge of providing students with enough skills that do not require a post-secondary degree. This will continue to be a challenge since there is a societal expectation that true success comes from a four-year college degree, which is not true. We should remove the stigma from vocational education, CTE, whatever you want to call it, and realize that because people are diverse in their interests, academic inclination, and skill set, so too should tracks of learning be diverse to meet their learning and career needs. Anything less is going to cut off access for a number of those who would like to live the American dream.
CTE demographic information from the Institute of Education Sciences can be found here.
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