Abstract
Post-recession Federal policy initiatives, such as secondary/postsecondary career pathways and gainful employment higher education accountability standards, prioritize the alignment of education practices with market-driven outcomes. Using longitudinal student record data merged from college and state K-12 data systems with the Unemployment Insurance wage records, this study examined the relationship between college and career success and the completion of dual credit courses in high school. During 2008-10, nearly 30% of graduates from 20 high schools who subsequently enrolled at a regional public technical college transferred an average of 6.0 dual high school and college credits. After controlling for several high school-level and individual-level factors, hierarchical linear models revealed that dual credit learners had significantly better outcomes than non-dual credit learners in terms of college course completion rates, second year retention, three-year graduation rate, as well as earnings in 2012-13. While our findings are limited to an upper Midwest community, they extend and highlight the positive relationship between high school dual credit completion and later college and labor market outcomes. Compared to dual credit courses completed on the college campus, courses offered at the high school and taught by high school career and technical instructors consistently predicted greater levels of college student success and better labor market outcomes. Additionally, several actionable student-level factors were associated with the significant college and career pathway outcomes, including high school preparation in mathematics.
Highlights
At both the national and state level, post-recesssion education policy has centered on improving the economic and marketplace returns, especially for secondary and postsecondary students and the institutions they attend
To allow a reasonable window of program completion, which is one of the outcomes of interest in this study, we focused on students who graduated from 20 public high schools in Fox Valley area in Wisconsin between 2008 and 2010 and enrolled in Fox Valley Technical College (FVTC) between 2009 and 2012 because the wage data of fiscal year 2013 (FY13) was the latest data available to us
In the following paragraphs we briefly summarized the predictors that were significantly related to the outcome variable in each model
Summary
At both the national and state level, post-recesssion education policy has centered on improving the economic and marketplace returns, especially for secondary and postsecondary students and the institutions they attend. Nothwithstanding the current debates surrounding the efficacy of market-driven education policy initiatives (Brown, Boser, Sargrad, & Marchitello, 2016; Darling-Hammond, Wilhoit & Pittenger 2014), there is an absence of compelling research and evaluation evidence informing how well particular careertechnical education policies and practices work under particular conditions for various groups of students (Gamoran, 2011, October 12; U.S Department of Education, 2014) In this regard, the Independent Advisory Panel for the recently completed National Assessment of Career and Technical Education (2014) argued that assessing the impact of career and technical education (CTE) on student attainment and achievement “. According to the Panel, only two states provide leaders with access to such actionable data from their State longitudinal data systems
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