"The State of Career Technical Education: Credentials of Value" report draws on a 2024 national scan of state practices, a 50-state survey, and interviews with state leaders to gather insights and strategies for improving the identification, validation, incentivization, and data collection related to credentials that support learners'…

In 2015, the Minnesota Legislature enacted Statute 135A.012, setting an ambitious goal: by 2025, 70% of Minnesota adults aged 25-44 will hold a postsecondary certificate or degree. To address longstanding gaps in educational access and outcomes, the statute also established interim benchmarks of 30% and 50% attainment for all racial and ethnic…

Interest in the field of career and technical education (CTE) has experienced a resurgence over the last decade, as the global economy has grown increasingly competitive while students have continued to leave school underprepared for well-paying twenty-first century jobs. Together and separately, the education and workforce sectors have sought to…

Research suggests teachers' observable characteristics are inequitably distributed across schools, leaving minoritized students with less exposure to experienced and credentialed teachers. While prior research focuses on how the teacher sorting explains disparities in students' test scores, little research explores how teacher quality gaps might…

The Student Success Center Network (SSCN) is dedicated to advancing racial justice and economic mobility by dramatically and equitably increasing the number of students earning postsecondary credentials with labor market value. Managed by Jobs for the Future, the SSCN has worked since 2012 to develop, implement, and scale student success…

Context: Mentorship has been identified as a primary organizational socialization tactic and has been directly associated with transition to practice. Objective: Understand how the mentoring relationship develops for the newly credentialed athletic trainer during the first year of clinical practice. Design: Grounded theory. Setting: Athletic…

Noncredit community college programs provide an important route for workforce development. They offer affordable and accessible short-term training options for individuals seeking access to middle-skills jobs. Absent the burdens of accreditation standards, they can respond nimbly to local labor market needs. However, they can also be varied and…

In Mississippi, 57% of job vacancies through 2022 will be middle-skill jobs, but only an estimated 50% of the state's workers will be trained to fill these jobs. The ACT WorkKeys assessment is the primary credentialing tool for high school students entering the middle-skill labor force. The problem addressed in this study is while Mississippi uses…

Texas, like many states, considers students to be "college, career, or military ready" if they earn an industry-based certification (IBC) in high school. While the expansion of opportunities for students to earn IBCs has been stimulated through state policy, limited research has systematically examined what factors influence students'…

Enrollment in American graduate degree programs is increasing, even as undergraduate enrollment declines continue in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With rising numbers of graduate awards, there has been increased attention on understanding the value of these degrees, especially master's degrees. With more workers attaining higher credentials,…

Florida is experiencing a shortage of high-quality mathematics teachers. According to the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE), there was a critical shortage of K-12 mathematics teachers (among several other subject areas) at the start of the 2022-2023 school year (FLDOE, 2022). In this report, the authors present selected findings from the…

This report is a response to congressional requests for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to identify, synthesize, and explain the core components of the workforce skills gap discourse and, to the extent possible, explore and clarify evidence on the existence of skills gaps. The report acknowledges that the skills gap label is often applied…

The paper shares the results of the process of forming a cross-disciplinary collaborative team and using a user-centered design framework to co-create a self-directed, self-paced, personalized, flexible learning environment as an alternative approach to preparing PK-8 preservice teachers to teach computational thinking. It is part of a larger…

Nationwide, many students who enroll in community college programs fail to persist in postsecondary education or complete a credential. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) Two-Year Occupational Grant Pilot Program (the Occupational Grant) was a financial aid program designed to increase persistence and completion rates through…

The diversity of higher education institutions is changing, and more post-traditional students, including those associated with the military, are engaging in higher education. Almost every post-secondary institution in the United States has military students. In 2020, $11.5 billion was spent on over 875,000 eligible military students. Military…