National Patterns of Career and Technical Education Course Offerings in Comprehensive Public High Schools

• In Event: Equitably Preparing Youth for Careers in the Changing World of Work

Abstract

Much of the existing research on Career and Technical Education (CTE) looks at how students differ in their CTE course-taking without considering that schools differ in their CTE offerings, thereby determining the options available to students. To address this gap in the literature, this study provides a national picture of CTE course offerings and examines whether school-level factors like size or student demographics are related to the types of CTE schools offer. Since much of the rhetoric about the value of CTE relates to its alignment with the local labor market (Holzer, Linn, & Monthey, 2013), this study also explores whether county-level measures of employment in various industries is related to course offerings. I merged data from the NCES High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), which includes the 2009-2010 course catalogs for a nationally representative sample of nearly 900 high schools, with data on school finances from the Civil Rights Data Collection and data on county-level employment from the American Community Survey.

Descriptive results show that nearly every comprehensive public high school in the sample offers at least one CTE course and the average number of fields offered is 8. Over half of schools (50.2%) offer CTE in 9 or more fields. Computer Science, Communications, and Business are offered at over 90% of schools while the least popular field is Public, Protective, & Government Services (PPGS), which is only offered at 47% of schools. To explore relationships with school- and county-level variables I use stepwise OLS regressions with the percent of all CTE classes offered in a given field as the outcome. Results show a significant negative relationship between the percent of white students in a school and an emphasis on Computer Science, Communications, and Health Science. On the contrary, the percent of white students in a school is positively related to a relative emphasis on Manufacturing, Architecture & Construction, Agriculture & Natural Resources, and Transportation, Distribution, & Logistics (TDL), though many of these relationships become weaker and insignificant once the local labor market variables are added. These fields are more popular in places with less employment in Information, Professional, Scientific, & Technical Services, which tend to be more rural and more white. School size is positively related to emphasizing PPGS, Engineering, Hospitality & Tourism, and TDL and per student finances is positively related to PPGS and Computer Science. Average student achievement and the percent of students eligible for Free or Reduced Lunch do not appear related to CTE course offerings.

Overall, results suggest that measures of the local labor market are stronger predictors of which fields of CTE schools emphasize than most of the school-level variables in this study, though the two categories are undoubtedly related. Future research on CTE course-taking at the student level may safely assume that nearly all students have access to fields like Computer Science or Business but may want to consider factors like urbanicity when examining participation in fields like Agriculture and Manufacturing.

Author

• Lynn Meissner, Northwestern University