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Career and technical education may be the last bipartisan issue in America.
From President Donald Trump to various Democratic governors, like Maryland’s Wes Moore, there’s wide consensus that U.S. high schools should do more to prepare students for the workforce. Often this is contrasted with promoting college, as more Americans and politicians question the value of a four-year degree.
This is more than a rhetorical shift. Some schools have indeed been expanding career and technical education offerings.
With this growth and excitement, I wanted to take a look at the research. Does CTE in fact help students? My takeaway: yes, some intensive CTE programs have been found to engage students, particularly boys, and prepare them for jobs. Yet, expanding career education may prove challenging.
The benefits of CTE
When Shaun Dougherty was a high school math teacher outside of Philadelphia, he noticed a striking phenomenon. Some of his students spent part of the day at a local career and technical education center. Those students often seemed unusually motivated to succeed in Dougherty’s class, even if they didn’t have natural aptitude in math.
“That sort of piqued my interest about this dedication to another part of school,” says Dougherty. He wondered whether career-focused programs help keep students engaged in school and set them up for success after.
Dougherty sought to answer these questions himself. He went to get his doctorate at Harvard and began studying CTE as an academic. Over the last decade plus, Dougherty, now a professor at Boston College, has published a series of studies that have reshaped the field’s understanding of career education.
A key takeaway: His intuition as an educator was right. In one set of papers, Dougherty examined dedicated CTE-focused high schools in Connecticut. Boys and students with disabilities graduated at higher rates and scored higher on standardized tests, compared to similar students who didn’t get to attend a CTE school.
Other studies of various career-focused schools and programs in California, Massachusetts, and North Carolina have also found a link with higher graduation rates. “It creates a way for students to connect to schooling,” says Dougherty.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, research has found little evidence that participating in high school CTE changes students’ chances of attending and completing four-year college. This misunderstanding is so prevalent that the Association for Career & Technical Education has a page describing it as a “myth” that “CTE is for students not going to college.” Many modern CTE programs — like those in education, engineering, and healthcare — are designed to expose students to careers that require college degrees.
Evidence on how CTE affects students’ careers is more limited, but promising for boys in particular. Studies in Connecticut and elsewhere have found intensive CTE programming can boost young men’s chances of finding better-paying jobs in their 20s.
Why expanding CTE isn’t a sure bet
Scaling a good thing in education is not easy, and so it goes with CTE.
New research by Dougherty and colleague Yerin Yoon looked at comprehensive high schools in Massachusetts that expanded their CTE offerings. This is different from his prior research in the state examining specialized CTE high schools.
In the new study, there was little evidence that CTE raised graduation rates. But it did reduce four-year college enrollment. And while students exposed to CTE earned more money right after graduating high school, that advantage quickly faded. If anything, by age 27, those students earned a bit less money, perhaps because some missed out on the benefits of college.
The CTE-focused high schools often have long-standing employer partnerships that high schools just starting to implement CTE may struggle to get off the ground, notes Dougherty. "The delivery model and the quality almost certainly matter," he says.
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(Thumbnail photo: Christian K. Lee for Chalkbeat)
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