Dive Brief:
- After decades of encouraging students to pursue Bachelor's degrees in lieu of attaining vocational training, California is investing millions to bump up the number of students pursuing career certificates. Many of the fields requiring such training face worker shortages due to a lack of qualified applicants, according to the Hechinger Report.
- Research conducted by the state's community college system indicates many students and families are unaware of the potential opportunities and benefits of acquiring some kind of vocational certification. However, students with career and technical education background are slightly more likely to be employed than their degree-holding counterparts but far more likely to be employed in their field of study.
- Challenges do remain; some parents are wary of advising their children to pursue careers in manufacturing after seeing so many jobs in factories be outsourced, while CTE programs tend to be more expensive per student. Advocates advise partnerships with private industry to help fund vocational programs in order to help develop potential talent.
Dive Insight:
Community college administrators have long been seen as the place for students who want to develop their professional credentials and obtain a specific program or skill development. But increasingly, the purpose of higher ed overall is being seen as providing a skill to lead to a job, and there is an opportunity for four-year institutions to step up and provide more career certification tracks as well.
As there has been increased attention paid towards vocational programs at two-year community colleges, four-year universities have realized they must learn to attract student applicants who may only be interested in a certain credential or program to burnish their work experience, lest those schools continue to feel the detrimental effects of declining enrollment and tuition revenue. Some schools, such as MIT, are "unbundling" their majors; the schools allows students to earn a credential in supply chain management that is a combination of MOOC and on-campus instruction. Offering more programs like this, as well as stackable microcredentials which can help working professionals target specific skills and experiences to better their professional opportunities, might help traditional four-year universities attract a new population of non-traditional learners.
However, the detail and complexity inherent in the unbundling of a traditional major and the rise of a wider array of microcredentials will make it all the more important that schools properly counsel students early on about their goals, and about what classes they need to take to fulfill those ambitions. Indiana University created degree maps as one way to help students avoid unnecessarily garnering excess credits on their path to a major, and maps to fulfill requirements, and how taking certain classes can offer the opportunity to fulfill multiple credentials, could be a boon for students and a prime selling point for institutions.
One of the largest challenges to overcome remains a misperception about what career and technical education programs mean for applicants and graduates, with an accompanying stigma that such programs are for students who are "not fit" for academic programs. An outreach and marketing plan based on outcomes may help to mitigate this stigma; for example, most students who do not consider CTE programs may reconsider when learning that such students tend to earn slightly more, on average, than their "academic" peers.
