Once a de facto means of maintaining within-school segregation, career and technical education (CTE) has, in recent years, experienced a favorable shift in public perception. Not only are schools less likely to confine students to strictly vocational or college-preparatory tracks, but educators and policymakers have also increasingly come to value career readiness. Nonetheless, skeptics rightly ask whether CTE still limits students’ academic opportunity. Addressing such concerns, a new study by a Florida State University researcher examines the effects of CTE on other course-taking, as well as whether these effects vary by student subgroup.
Study author Walter G. Ecton analyzes data for all 310,524 Massachusetts public high school students enrolled from 2011–2012 to 2017–2018. Using a series of regression models, he tests the impact of two variables: the total number of CTE courses taken, and whether the student was formally designated a “CTE concentrator.” Outcome measures include the number of courses taken both in core academic subjects and in elective subjects. Ecton’s models control for a host of student factors: gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, town of residence, middle school and high school effects, past academic performance, and past attendance rates.
First, he finds that CTE course-taking correlates with only a very small decrease in course-taking in the core academic areas of English language arts (ELA), math, science, and social studies. As Ecton explains, “[F]or CTE to predict a full ELA course decrease, students would need to take roughly 32 additional CTE courses”—an impossibility, since Massachusetts students need only take twenty-two courses to graduate. Moreover, the effects of CTE course-taking on core academic subjects are no longer significant when the model controls for high school choice. In practical terms, then, taking CTE courses makes Massachusetts students no less likely to take as many academic courses as their peers. This news should not be particularly surprising, given that the state requires three to four years in each of these subjects for graduation; still, the news may be unwelcome to some CTE advocates, who argue that student schedules should allow more time for apprenticeships and other professionalization opportunities.
On the other hand, taking even a small number of CTE courses predicts a reduced likelihood of other electives, including fine arts and world languages. This finding should also be unsurprising. Students have finite time in high school, and if they want to fit a carpentry class into their schedules, it makes more sense to drop ceramics than it does to forgo algebra. Even so, these tradeoffs merit serious consideration, as fine arts and languages have long been viewed as part of a well-rounded, liberal education—to which all children deserve access—and in more concrete terms, research has shown such courses’ positive correlation with key outcomes like reading, writing, and math achievement, as well as behavior and graduation rates.
Ecton’s breakdown of findings for different student subgroups reveals few variations, suggesting at least a softening of the racial and socioeconomic divisions that long defined CTE. But an exception lies in the findings based on prior student performance. For the highest-achieving students, becoming a “CTE concentrator” predicted 1.2 fewer Advanced Placement (AP)/International Baccalaureate (IB) courses compared to similarly high-achieving peers. This result is worrisome, since most AP/IB courses are in core academic areas, so there should not be the same scheduling conflict as with fine arts or world languages; that is, students are typically choosing between biology and AP Biology, not between automotive technology and AP Biology. Of course, there may be unmeasurable factors, like student goals, that help explain this difference in AP/IB course-taking. Just the same, districts and schools should pay careful attention to ensuring that their highest-achieving students have equitable access—both formal and informal—to advanced courses, regardless of their interest in CTE.
Conversely, for the lowest-achieving students, becoming a “CTE concentrator” correlates with fewer “study hall” and “miscellaneous” courses. This relationship may simply occur because these students are choosing cosmetology over study hall—which could be quite beneficial, as research shows that CTE courses offer a range of benefits, from graduation rates to adulthood earnings and employment. Yet, as Ecton notes, the negative relationship between these course-taking rates could be problematic if struggling students are choosing CTE over support classes that could be helping them in core academic areas.
Although pursuing CTE courses does not decrease access to basic academics in Massachusetts, the trend might differ for states with less prescriptive graduation requirements. And despite CTE’s revamp, Ecton’s study reiterates decades-old questions about how CTE course-taking might affect the highest- and lowest-performing students, both in the Bay State and elsewhere.
SOURCE: Walter G. Ecton, “The Opportunity Costs of Career and Technical Education: Coursetaking Tradeoffs for High School CTE Students,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (October 2023).
