Career technical education (CTE) has evolved markedly over the past century to provide a viable avenue for high school students who may seek an alternative and successful academic path that leads to a well-paid future career in the workforce. Recent studies have found that Career and Technology Education can lower dropout rates among high school…

Pathway programs provide early exposure to various health careers. Positive program outcomes have been conveyed from the student's perspective. Previous studies yet to demonstrate a focus on the experiences of high school teachers who instruct in pathway programs. The primary research question for this study is: How do high school teachers…

The following study was conducted as a qualitative narrative study of four Mexican American secondary engineering teachers, including my own auto-ethnography as a Mexican American engineer and educator, working in school districts populated by primarily Mexican American students. The study stemmed from a general lack of attention in the literature…

Advising students on college admissions and financial aid is an important pillar of most high school counseling programs. This work has become more challenging for many school counselors since the pandemic, so it is imperative to find new ways to explore how counselors approach college advising today. This novel research utilized Hansen's (1995)…

When young adults with disabilities (YAWD) age out of the system, they face what has colloquially been termed "the cliff," which symbolizes the sudden drop in services that occur as they transition out of high school; needs previously met at school are left unaddressed. Multiple options have been suggested to meet these needs, including…

As the hospitality and tourism workforce evolves high school Career and Technology Education (CTE) hospitality and tourism programs must remain relevant and innovative (Gauthier, 2020). One of the main goals of offering hospitality and tourism as a program of study during high school is to transition graduates into the hospitality and tourism…

Mathematics plays a crucial role in engineering education. Students who are good at math are often advised to consider engineering as a career. In this study, engineers, mathematics teachers, and engineering professors were asked about the type of mathematics representative of engineering, whether the engineering problems created by math…

The need for engineers in the workforce continues to grow. Filling this need requires recruiting future engineers to colleges and universities and retaining them through to degree completion. However, this is easier said than done. Universities are tasked with attempting to keep up with the demand for new engineers and companies are searching for…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education systems across the world. High school Career and Technical Education (CTE) health science programs that rely on experiential learning activities for successful outcomes took a severe hit. Experiential learning opportunities such as internships, field experiences, and clinical rotations did not occur, and…

Seeking to enhance efforts toward diversity in the teaching profession, this study used a heuristic methodology to explore how the lived experiences of high school students of Color participating in an education pathways high school course shaped their perceptions of the teaching career. Critical race theory (CRT), critical whiteness studies, and…

Though teacher attrition has always been an issue at the center of educational research, recent increased rates of turnover among veteran public education teachers before retirement suggests a new trend worth investigating. Prior research has shown connections between this trend and the increased focus on accountability mandates in the last two…

This qualitative multi-case study delved into the perceptions of five immigrant and refugee high school students enrolled in an early childhood pathway program in a Midwest high school in the USA. The primary objectives were to explore how these aspiring teachers' Funds of Identity (FOI) influenced their perceptions of teaching in the USA,…

In the years 2005 to 2019, the number of American women receiving a degree in engineering was below 20 percent. Furthermore, even after receiving a degree in engineering, 40% of those girls do not enter the profession. While the above graduation data is essential for understanding the problem at the end of the educational journey, it doesn't point…

The national teacher shortage seems to be a never-ending crisis in our country. This shortage is even more alarming for teachers of color. While more than half of the students in the United States are non-white, less than 25 percent of their teachers are people of color (U.S. Department of Education, 2016; Lindsay, Blom, & Tilsley, 2017).…

This dissertation contains three chapters, each investigating a question in American economic history. The first chapter is co-authored with Ran Abramitzky, Santiago Perez, and Joseph Price. In this work, we conduct a large-scale digitization of historical college registers, encompassing 2.7 million students at 65 elite US universities. We use…