To the Editor:
We read with great interest “Career and Technical Education, a Key to Good Jobs, Needs Help, Report Says” (The Chronicle, September 17).
We commend the effort by Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce to bring attention to the important issue of career and technical pathways, and to the need for an information system that links student-transcript information with employer-wage records. Fortuitously, in 2011 the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences awarded a five-year grant to establish the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment to help create just such an information system.
Housed by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College of Columbia University, the center is conducting research to gain a far clearer understanding of labor-market outcomes for a wide range of postsecondary pathways, including career and technical pathways.
Currently, we know a fair amount about employment outcomes for bachelor’s and associate degrees. However, researchers at the center are analyzing data from millions of students across five states in order to understand on a much more detailed level the relationships among different programs, majors, and degrees and employment outcomes.
This research will provide students, institutions, employers, and policy makers with relatively precise information on the economic value of various postsecondary pathways—knowledge that is critical in this period of increasingly scarce resources.
The center also intends to foster this type of research. Currently, gathering and linking student-transcript and employment-outcome data is complicated and time consuming. By bringing partner states together to learn from each other, the center is promoting greater access to, and use of, these data. The hope is that, within the next five years, more people will be doing this kind of research to the benefit of both students and higher-education policy makers.
Thomas Bailey
Director
Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment
Community College Research Center
Teachers College
Columbia University
New York