For many years graduate and professional education programs for the health professions have sought to increase the diversity of their student body to include students from a wider variety of backgrounds. Increasing the diversity of healthcare providers is an essential component of addressing inequities in healthcare. However, despite initiatives…

The skilled technical workforce (STW) comprises workers in occupations that require significant science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) skills but not a bachelor's degree for entry. The United States had over 17 million STW workers in 2017, and is expected to be short about 3.4 million workers who are qualified for the available…

Career Technical Education (CTE)--a structured series of courses that provides high school students technical and vocational skills, paving the way to postsecondary education and careers--is key to aligning secondary education with both labor market needs and college opportunities. CTE provides high school students with the chance to engage in…

Past work has documented significant occupational segregation between Black and white workers in the U.S. labor force. Little work, however, has examined racial occupational segregation in recent years or by levels of education and then at the intersection of education and race. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by calculating a…

The purpose of this quantitative correlational-predictive study was to determine if and to what extent students' Cognitive Ability, first-term GPA, and ethnicity predict student graduation status from a CTE college in Texas. Student retention rates continue to be a cause for great concern for higher learning, even more so for CTE institutions.…

Greater diversity in the healthcare workforce has been identified as a critical need in serving an increasingly diverse population. Higher education institutions have been tasked with increasing the number of underrepresented students in the health occupations pipeline to better align with the demographics of the general population and meet the…

Children develop their perceptions, expectations, and attitudes toward the occupational world much earlier than they enter it, also via television which serves as a central socialization agent in the preschool years. The current study thematically analyzes the values associated with the occupational world in children's series by integrating two…

Parental influences, particularly parents' occupations, may influence individuals' entry into the teaching profession. This mechanism may contribute to the relatively static demographic composition of the teaching force over time. We assess the role of parental influences on occupational choice by testing whether the children of teachers are…

This dissertation explored the career aspirations of Black and Latinx undergraduates in underrepresented health fields, crucial due to health disparities and social determinants. Using data from the 2015-2019 Higher Education Research Institute, the research analyzed factors impacting students' pursuit of healthcare careers through logistic…

Research on the dearth of teachers of color has focused on disparities in college enrollment, completion, and academic major. The present study examines whether disparities may begin earlier. Analyses of nationally representative longitudinal data show that students of color are 2 to 4 percentage points less likely to hold teaching career…

The present study discusses a pilot intervention for youth in a predominantly Latinx rural community in the U.S. The intervention incorporated multimodal creative activities into the social cognitive career theory-based healthcare career program. Participants (N = 75) were assessed for healthcare career self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and…

The Commission on Accreditation of Physical Therapy Education requires Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) program directors to have the necessary academic and professional qualifications to lead their programs, but many directors lack awareness of their leadership styles. The purpose of this quantitative descriptive correlational study was to…

To assess the self-reported professional identity of healthcare majors at a large public university, and to understand the degree to which the students perceive their healthcare programs support the development of this identity. An online, modified version of the Professional Identity Five-Factor Scale (Tan, Van der Molen, and Schmidt [2017]. 'A…

Apprenticeships are structured training programs that combine paid on-the-job learning with classroom instruction and provide a pathway to industry-recognized qualifications in in-demand occupations. The apprenticeship route can offer an alternative to traditional college (and college debt), yet traditionally, women have been much less likely to…

The labor-market payoff to workers with associate degrees in healthcare and STEM occupations is very high in Massachusetts. We examine whether this induced a growing proportion of students in MA community colleges (MACCs) to earn an associate degree (AD) in one of these fields. We do this by using multinomial logit analysis to compare trends…