College Readiness Assessment
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Over the last 15 years, Career and Technical Education (CTE) has been changing as schools have aimed to better meet workforce needs and diversify pathways into higher education and the workforce. This study provides the first known causal evidence on the impact of CTE program expansion in U.S. comprehensive high schools on student participation and postsecondary outcomes. Using administrative data from Massachusetts, we leverage variation from the staggered rollout of high-quality CTE program offerings across high schools and examine overall effects as well as heterogeneity by student and program characteristics. Our findings show that access to a new CTE program induces 11.5 percent of prior non-participants to take-up the program. CTE exposure increases the number of quarters with earnings by 2 percent, with larger effects for students with disabilities and Black or Hispanic students. Conditional on employment, exposure increases earnings one year after high school graduation, particularly among male students, but these gains fade from age 23 onward. We also find suggestive evidence that exposure to Education programs for female students and IT programs for Black or Hispanic students increase four-year college enrollment and completion by 5 percent.
Keywords
Career and Technical Education, Postsecondary Outcomes, College, Earnings
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/x8hk-xj77
