The policy brief describes a study done by the Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest. Round Rock Independent School District (ISD) wanted to enhance its high school career and technical education (CTE) programming to prepare CTE graduates to either enter high-wage, in-demand careers in Central Texas or continue their education after high…

Survey methodology is the dominant approach among universities in the United States for reporting employment outcomes for recent graduates. However, past studies have shown that survey methodology may yield upwardly biased results, which can result in overreporting of employment rates and salary outcomes. This case study describes the development…

The massification of higher education has dramatically changed the association between credentials and jobs in advanced countries, while its impacts in transitional economies have received less academic attention. To address this research lacuna, the paper utilizes rich information from China's national surveys of college graduates from 2003 to…

Purpose: The study aims to provide insight on the potential effectiveness of demand-side financing for catalyzing improved educational outcomes in Malawi; and, given the extent of cost-related constraints to school contexts in other low-income countries, the results have relevance for education policy decisions more broadly.…

We use vocational training curricula to investigate how IT skills are trained within broader "skills packages" and how these relate to labour market outcomes. Skills packages are the typical combinations of IT skills (e.g., CNC) and technical or nontechnical skills (e.g., material sciences or work safety) that are jointly required in the…

This paper estimates the heterogeneous labor market effects of enrolling in higher education short-cycle (SC) programs. Expanding access to these programs might affect the behavior of some students (compliers) in two margins: the expansion margin (students who would not have enrolled in higher education otherwise) and the diversion margin…

Largely introduced in the early 2000s, college postgraduate credentials are a relatively new type of Canadian college credential, which typically require a postsecondary credential (e.g., a college diploma or bachelor's degree) as a prerequisite for entry. They are generally directed at providing career-specific skills, and frequently incorporate…

Community colleges have been hailed as a "cornerstone of American higher education", and act as an important access point to post-secondary education for a wide range of students, particularly socioeconomically disadvantaged students and underrepresented minorities. However, community colleges have also been criticized for poor…

This study investigates community college skills builders--students who enroll for a short time, take courses concentrated in career and technical education (CTE), are highly successful in their coursework, but typically leave college without a postsecondary credential. Drawing on administrative data from Colorado, Ohio, Michigan, and California,…

Astronomy PhD recipients generally follow three main outcomes after receiving their degrees: they accept a postdoctoral position, a non-postdoctoral temporary position, or a potentially permanent position. To learn more about these outcomes, AIP annually asked new astronomy PhDs about their immediate post-degree outcomes. For the classes of 2018,…

Schools continue to face specific and persistent teacher shortages in certain subjects, such as upper-level math and special education, and in certain schools, including historically under-resourced schools and rural schools. Declining participation in teacher preparation programs, coupled with high turnover in the profession, suggests that a…

This current dissertation used case study (Yin, 2018) to examine United States female college students' perceptions of their financial literacy, especially with respect to their debt accumulation and the gender wage gap, at a public, 4-year institution in New Jersey. It answered the following research questions: How are student debt, financial…

In this paper, we estimate a rich model of college major choice using a panel of experimentally-derived data. Our estimation strategy combines two types of data: data on self-reported beliefs about future earnings from potential human capital decisions and survey-based measures of risk and time preferences. We show how to use these data to…

An underdeveloped talent supply pipeline has resulted in a skills gap and a skilled labor shortage in the manufacturing sector across the United States. This is potentially the result of a lack of diversity in educational opportunity offered to students, an emphasis on college enrollment rates as a high school performance metric, and the…

Increasingly, parents of young children need postsecondary credentials to compete in the labor market and meet basic family needs. This study uses a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of Career"Advance," a two-generation education intervention that offers postsecondary career training in healthcare for parents paired with…