Leveraging Professional Skills to Increase Economic Mobility and Racial Equity

• In Event: Academics, Professional Skills, and Critical Thinking—What Drives Students’ Economic Mobility?

Abstract

Education can create economic opportunity and foster social mobility. While high schools represent a crucial time for preparing students for college and careers, academic progress on National assessments has halted in most U.S. high schools. In response, various stakeholders have sought to innovate high schools by offering a range of school models. However, research has suggested that even under policies that allow for greater autonomy, many school models—especially those that focus on college preparation and serve disadvantaged students—experience difficulties in making substantial innovations that affect learning. Unsurprisingly, there has been mixed evidence on the effectiveness of these school models. Although career-connected learning represents an innovation that can alter schools’ curriculums, instructional practices, and learning environments, school models that embody career-connected learning tend to focus on a limited set of careers and rarely focus college preparation, which can ultimately limit social mobility.

 To promote social mobility for disadvantaged students, the Cristo Rey Network (CRN) of college preparatory high schools facilitates unique work- and school-based learning through a novel Corporate Work-Study Program (CSWP). The CSWP provides all students with a tangible work-based learning experience one day per week at a local corporation, which is accompanied with a school-based curriculum that focuses on professional skills and competencies, as well as college preparation. While CRN’s CWSP model represents a promising “hybrid” model of college preparation and career-connected learning, rigorous research has yet to explore its ability to promote social mobility. We therefore leverage a partnership with 14 CRN schools across the country that includes detailed data on skill formation in the CWSP and conventional education measures, as well as education data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) and economic data from Equifax (EQX) to demonstrate CRN’s impact on social mobility. With unique access to CRN admissions data, we use arbitrary cut-off scores in the CRN admissions process to employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to examine the near-causal impacts of CRN admission on post-secondary education and employment, earnings, debt, wealth, and credit.

CRN high schools represent a novel high school model that embeds career-connected learning within a college preparatory environment. Most uniquely, CRN’s career-connected learning occurs in corporate work setting, exposing disadvantaged students to “white-collar” professionals and careers. This exposure not only provides students with non-cognitive skills and professional competencies, but also with new sources of social capital. This reimagined “hybrid” model of professional career-connected learning accompanied by college preparatory curriculum may be more impactful for promoting college enrollment and success in high-skill, white-collar occupations than both traditional college preparatory high schools and career academies. Thus, findings from our research will provide policymakers with some of the first rigorous evidence on whether this hybrid model of professional work-based learning can promote social mobility later in life. Furthermore, since there is very little research to date on the impact of a public-private partnership for job training in high schools, we believe these results will also be particularly useful for policymakers considering these types of high school models.

Author

• Shaun M Dougherty, Boston College
  Presenting Author