Credits on the Margin: Statewide Articulation Agreements and Postsecondary Outcomes for Career and Technical Education Students

• In Event: Sustainable Secondary CTE Systems: Evidence on Postsecondary Pathways, Teacher Retention, and Local Labor Markets

Abstract

Does offering community college credit incentivize college access and completion for students enrolled in career and technical education (CTE) programs? States often build structured pathways that connect high school to community college technical degree programs for CTE students. These pathways work by offering students credit for previous learning and clarifying a course sequence toward a credential, usually through establishing articulation agreements – formal agreements that coordinate credit transfer across institutions (Roksa & Keith, 2008). However, it is an open question whether establishing these agreements is sufficient to overcome barriers to college access and completion, such as limited information and bureaucratic complexity (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011; Baker, 2016; Dynarski et al., 2021; Page & Scott-Clayton, 2016)

This study leverages the staggered rollout of statewide articulation agreements between high schools and community colleges in Massachusetts to estimate their causal effect on postsecondary outcomes. Through a stacked difference-in-differences design, I compare students enrolled in CTE programs deemed eligible for community college credit to students enrolled in CTE programs that were never eligible. I find there is no overall effect on two-year or four-year college enrollment, and I have enough precision to rule out large effects. However, there is a modest, positive effect of approximately 0.5 percentage points on graduating with a two-year credential within three years of high school graduation – about a 14 percent increase over the control mean. This effect appears to be concentrated among middle-achieving students and students enrolled in vocational high schools. Further, there is suggestive evidence that this policy operates through accelerating time to degree. These findings indicate that statewide articulation agreements appear to be most effective in reducing barriers for CTE students on the margin of community college completion.

I make two key contributions to the literature. First, this paper is the first to isolate the causal effect of high school-community college articulation agreements on college enrollment and completion. Second, I analyze how different groups of students respond to these college-going incentives, going beyond the previous papers in the literature (Bonilla & Thim, 2025; Cellini, 2006; Neumark & Rothstein, 2006).

Author

• Julian A Hayes, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  Presenting Author