Exploring Economic and Workforce Development Alignment: A Content Analysis of California’s Community College Baccalaureate Program Applications

• In Event: Examining Community College Baccalaureates (CCBs) as Tools for Social Mobility and Equity

Abstract

Community college baccalaureate (CCB) programs are expanding across the nation (Meza & Love, 2023) and especially in California–home of the largest and most ethnically/racially diverse community college system in the nation (California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, 2022). CCB programs are a strategy to provide an accessible and affordable pathway towards baccalaureate attainment and to meet economic & workforce development (EWD) goals, particularly for place-bound students from historically minoritized communities (Fulton, 2020). While the United States’ community colleges have historically been tasked with providing accessible education to align with EWD, more can be learned about how they go about doing so (Brint & Karabel, 1989; D’Amico, 2016; Sublett et al., 2021). This research project examines the following research question: How did the first 15-approved California CCB programs justify that their programs were aligned with local EWD?

We apply the three elements of the career capital framework (D’Amico et al., 2019) to understand community colleges’ EWD alignment; given the relevance of place and space in CCB programs, we will also incorporate a fourth element: knowing where. This project will not only build upon the career capital framework by incorporating critical spatial perspectives (Soja, 1996, 2010; Solórzano & Vélez, 2016), but will also reorient the analysis at the organizational level rather than the student level. Organizational-level approaches can be valuable in understanding the broader structural opportunities and constraints in which community college students operate within (Calcagno et al., 2008) (see Table 1 for a summary of this converted framework). As such, this project explores how the first 15-approved California CCB programs justified their EWD alignment by articulating knowing why (goals & motivation), how (knowledge, skills, & abilities), whom (information & support), and where (place & space) in their proposals.

A qualitative content analysis of the first 15-approved California community colleges’ CCB application proposals was conducted. Content analysis is a “research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts” (Krippendorff, 2004, p. 18) to “understand what they mean to people, what they enable or prevent, and what the information conveyed by them does” (p. xviii). As such, this method is appropriate since CCB applications are text data and they provide information on the ways of knowing (why, where, how, and whom) that CCB colleges relied upon to justify their programs’ EWD alignment.

The findings generated suggest that the first 15-approved California CCB colleges (i) utilized multiple and varied information & sources to understand their labor market conditions, (ii) were limited in articulating concrete practices, programs, structures, and systems to align with EWD and support students’ entry into good jobs, and (iii) rarely acknowledged and discussed how their programs would address inequitable labor market experiences and outcomes.

Practitioners, policymakers, and researchers can support more comprehensive data systems that better understand local labor market conditions and allow for intersectional and predictive analysis that acknowledges inequitable and heterogeneous labor market experiences and outcomes. CCB colleges have many opportunities to develop meaningful practices, programs, structures, and systems that are EWD aligned and to foster equity in the labor market.

Authors

• Davis Vo, University of California - Los Angeles

• Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, University of California - Los Angeles