Lessons On Career And Technical Education From America's Oldest Trade School
The nation is suffused in enthusiastic talk about career and technical education. Policymakers ranging from President Trump to Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders have called for more schooling that can equip students for in-demand, middle-class jobs. Well, a lot of the discussion is driven by advocates, academics and elected officials. It seems useful to ask those with a track record of actually doing this work what they think.
Career and Technical Education: Not Your Grandpa's Vo-Tech
The United States is in dire need of a technically trained workforce. According to a 2017 report by the National Science Academy of Sciences we, as a nation, are not meeting the increasing demand from industries -- a critical component for competing globally in the 21st century. The need has been identified, but the solution can be a slippery one to define for several reasons.
Career Education's Incomplete Transformation
Betsy DeVos has spent much of her tenure as education secretary pushing alternatives to the traditional college experience. The nation should do much more, she has said, to expose students to occupational skills training that has long been stigmatized in favor of a four-year degree. Career and technical education, which was once known as vocational training, has shed some of that stigma thanks in part to growth of new fields in communications, health care and engineering.
Rethinking Career and Technical Education
As an African American, first-generation college graduate, I have slowly come to recognize the competitive advantage that a lab tech CTE program will provide my daughter. I had my reservations, based on the history of African Americans and vocational education, but could not argue with the outcomes or options. I believe the time has come for black students and college administrators to reconsider the value of CTE as a viable career pathway and untapped source of diverse students, respectively.
How Aligned is Career and Technical Education to Local Labor Markets?
Overall, the study finds that many fields that support a significant number of U.S. jobs see little CTE course-taking in high school, suggesting the potential for greater alignment in these areas.
Students are also more likely to take courses in fields that support more local jobs, but less likely to do so when those jobs are high-paying, suggesting that today's CTE is connecting kids with jobs that are plentiful but low-paying by industry standards.
The State of American Trade Schools
"We are lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist," says Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe, summing up a widespread viewpoint for Fox News. Into this breach have stepped trade and tech schools with a seductive promise: instead of spending four years and amassing life-crushing debt chasing a four-year degree with softening value, spend less money and time--typically one or two years, but as little as nine weeks, for a coding boot camp--training for a specific job in an industry that pays well and has a massive need for workers.
CTE classes are popular, but only 25% of students take courses that could lead to the nation's biggest industries, new study finds
Business, marketing, tourism and manufacturing make up more than half of U.S. jobs -- but students in high school probably don't know that. Only one-quarter of the career and technical education classes students take are focused on these industries, according to a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.
How Aligned is Career and Technical Education to Local Labor Markets?, co-authored by Pepperdine University associate professor Cameron Sublett and Fordham Institute senior research and policy associate David Griffith, examines whether students in high school CTE programs are more likely to take courses in high-demand and/or high-wage industries, both nationally and locally.
Why vocational education is critical for many young people
In this high-tech era where a college degree is positioned as a necessity for success, vocational education is often overlooked. But experts say that a vocational education provides the right experience for many jobs that are currently vacant. Indeed, there are 30 million jobs nationwide that don't require a Bachelor's Degree that pay an average of $55,000 annually, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
Is Career And Technical Education Good News Or Bad?
Now it is finally occurring to some folks that A) college is not necessarily the best choice for all students and B) the world needs people who do what Mike Rowe always called the jobs "that make civilized life possible for the rest of us." Done well, new studies show, it can boost both academics and wages for students. It might even help solve the mystery of the missing non-college educated male workers. And so Career and Technical Education (CTE) is coming back into its own.
Stay informed of latest news on STEM Education, innovation, science, and technology. Our newsletter aggregates the latest news, commentary, breaking reports, and videos from around the web and deliver them to your inbox.