What the Best Career and Technical Programs Have in Common

What are the essential elements of a high-quality career and technical education program?

A growing number educators are asking that question as the demand for CTE courses grows, fueled in large part by students and parents questioning the return on investment of a college education and students wanting to develop job-related skills that they can put to work right out of high school or college.

Education Week spoke with Walter Ecton, an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan and an expert on CTE, about what it takes to build and maintain a strong career and technical education program.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

First, what does the research show about the long-term benefits of CTE?

We have strong evidence at this point that high-quality CTE leads to stronger earnings and employment outcomes for students at least in the short to medium range. We have evidence all the way up through around 10 years or so after high school graduation. CTE students have higher earnings than we would otherwise expect them to have.

There is less evidence in the United States context on longer-term outcomes once you get past around 10 years. There’s a couple of reasons for that: One is just there were not a lot of people researching CTE in the late 90s and early 2000s.

What are the critical components of a high-quality CTE program?

The research is still a little out about this, but here are a few things I would say.

The CTE pathways that have the strongest outcomes are ones where there’s a very clear pathway for students after their time in a high school CTE program. One example would be health care. There’s very often an explicit next step program at a local community or technical college that might be geared toward nursing or other health care professions.

The strongest CTE programs are also marrying both technical skills together with academic skills. Your highest-quality CTE programs are really engaged in rigorous reading and writing and math, and students are getting robust training in those critical skills, which is really important, especially if later in life they change career paths. Something I get concerned about are CTE programs that are only preparing students to do one specific job, because what if that job goes away in five or 10 years?

A third thing is strong CTE programs have relationships with local employers. One reason is that it helps teachers to stay more up to date in what current practices in the field are. Also, having buy-in and relationships with local employers can help to create a pipeline for students to [apprenticeships and] eventual jobs.

CTE when done well has a lot to recommend itself in terms of just the learning style. It’s more problem-solving-based. It’s more hands-on. There’s more of a connection to the real world.

How is technology changing what skills students need?

Increasingly with today’s economy and with this rapid speed of technological change students are going to need to go back to some sort of post-secondary education to get new credentials. That might not necessarily be a bachelor’s degree, it might be an associate’s, or it might be a certificate or a diploma at a technical college or community college.

Why do schools need to pay close attention to economic trends?

Another indicator of a high-quality CTE program is that it is preparing students for jobs that are both high wage but also in high demand.

You’ll see sometimes a school offering a CTE program that they’ve been offering for decades because it’s popular and because the teacher has been teaching the same subject for a long time. But what if that’s no longer an industry that’s in demand? That can be frustrating for students if they spend three or four years taking classes and certification exams, and when it comes time to graduate, they realize, “oh, well, there’s not actually jobs in my area in this field, or the jobs in this area don’t pay anywhere near what I was expecting them to.”

Cosmetology is still one of the most popular programs of study around the country. But the jobs that cosmetology programs lead to, largely, pay quite poorly. In some areas, there’s an oversupply of people who are credentialed in those areas, which makes it really hard for students to set up a sustainable career for themselves.

The caveat is if there are students who are just loving their cosmetology class and it’s making them love school and be engaged in their education, then there still might be real benefits to that. But I do think that it’s incumbent upon schools and districts to do the best they can to create programs that really are going to set students up for what’s next.

Does CTE have educational value beyond students’ future employment earnings?

Absolutely. You could look at CTE as a workforce development tool that’s matching students together with employers, and that’s important. You can also definitely see CTE as an engagement tool.

Think about a student who, for whatever reason, doesn’t love school, doesn’t love being in a traditional classroom and sitting at a desk and reading a textbook and filling out worksheets. CTE can be a much more engaging form of education for those students.

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence that I’ve seen in favor of CTE is that CTE students tend to be less likely to be chronically absent. In my mind, that’s a pretty good indicator of students who are more engaged.