An increasing preference for nondegree credentials evident prior to the pandemic has become even more apparent. Nondegree credentials can and sometimes should be part of a postsecondary education, but the inchoate credentials environment encourages poor planning and unwise decisions. The competitive advantages that a balanced education can offer…

Microenterprises in the classroom provide a unique way to incorporate academic goals within transitional skill instruction for students with developmental disabilities. The purpose of this article is to discuss how the principles of microenterprises can be used by classroom teachers to practice these skills as well as an overview of how to create…

The Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC) adopted the Master Plan for Tennessee Postsecondary Education 2015-2025 in 2015. Published as Tennessee was launching the Drive to 55, the 2015-2025 Plan includes state and system-level projections of the necessary degree production to reach our state's ambitious attainment goal. As a complement to…

With very few exceptions colleges and universities of all types--2-year and 4-year, public and private-- are feeling the fiscal pinch. They are caught in the vise of rising expectations and constrained revenues. Public institutions are operating in an environment in which state-level policy-makers press for increasing numbers of graduates,…

Case Studies to Advance Skills and Employability is a project designed to introduce a vocational dimension into academic curriculum. Key employability skills are developed as students work on real-life case situations in such areas as public sculpture, waste management, human organizations, and environmental issues. (SK)

Hoping to motivate more California students to finish high school and find future success, the James Irvine Foundation last week announced a new center aimed at expanding work-based learning programs that integrate high-level academics. Called ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career, the new project will seek to provide solutions…

Discusses the implementation of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) and its impact on community colleges. Relates WIA to issues of new vocationalism and describes some creative community college programs. (Contains 17 references.) (NB)

This primer is intended as a guide for the development and improvement of summer youth programs. The primer focuses on three common forms of summer academic enrichment strategies that combine work and learning: work-based learning strategies, classroom-based enrichment strategies, and summer jobs strategies. It includes information on the…

The Career Immersion program, which has been conducted since 1989-90 at Silver Spring Elementary School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, introduces the world of work to students at an early age. The program's primary activities involve hands-on, school-based learning in which all students participate. Students between the ages of 3 and 13 participate in 2…

Both the rapid movement to the knowledge/imagination age and a more thorough understanding of how problem-solving skills are developed challenge traditional education to change and adopt a new set of goals. Academic and vocational education are modifying their goals and instructional procedures, and they are blending together. As technology has…

Describes the Coordinated Vocational Academic Education in Office Duplication Practices program designed to keep disadvantaged students in school, provide them with entry-level skills, and supply them with confidence. Examines the problems these students face, type of student served, equipment needed, instructional areas, teacher training, and the…

The Academy for High Performance at McHenry County College in Crystal Lake, Illinois, attempts through integrated workplace education programs to develop empowered workers capable of functioning in today's high-performance workplaces and individuals who are empowered in the fullest, transformative, liberating sense of the word. The academy's…

As American society has changed from the industrial age to the information age to the knowledge/imagination age, the notion of a comprehensive high school in its originally envisioned form has again become a high priority. If all students are required to obtain a rigorous academic education and an applied education related to a life or work…

Project Forward, conducted at Cape Cod Community College (Massachusetts) since 1988, provides campus-based, vocational skills instruction along with work-based experience for students with disabilities. Forty-five students aged 18-40 are currently being served by the project. The majority of the students have specific learning disabilities,…

This annual report of the Community Colleges of Arizona for Fiscal Year (FY) 2000-2001 offers individual statistics from each of the 10 community college districts in the state. Facts for the state system include the following: (1) the annual full-time equivalent enrollment for FY 2000-2001 was 97,588, the unduplicated headcount was 349,278, and…