"What Career and Technical Education (CTE) Programs Should Our District Offer?"
How Contigo Ed Helps Districts Approach Programs of Study (POS) Decisions With Data
by Contigo Ed’s Data Analytics Team
What new CTE programs should we launch? What programs should we consider sunsetting? These are the questions that many of our district partners are currently grappling with. Today, we wanted to share a few of the data-driven ways we are supporting our district partners in making decisions around program of study (POS) offerings.
Before we share some of the analyses we conduct to inform program of study decisions, we also want to acknowledge that these are not the only factors that should be considered. Other factors include input from the local business community, availability of resources and teachers, etc. That said, we hope the inputs below provide some guidance as you design your own process for making decisions that maximize opportunity for your students.
Local Labor Market Data
Our team leans heavily on labor market data to understand future growth projections in high-wage, high-demand occupations. For our Texas district partners, we lean heavily on data provided by TEA for each workforce development area (see example screenshot below for Tarrant County). We use this data to answer a number of questions such as the following:
What occupations that pay above a living / median wage are expected to see the highest growth in the next 10 years?
What POS do these high-wage, high-growth occupations most align to?
Do some of our current programs not align to high-wage, high-growth occupations? Are there programs we do not currently offer that we should consider offering?
For the POS we offer (or we are considering offering), what type of degree do they require?
Longitudinal Student Outcomes
While labor market data is especially important to consider, we also bring a lens of what programs of study lead to the best long-term outcomes for students. Unfortunately, districts do not typically have access to workforce outcomes for their students to understand whether their CTE offerings are effective. We often support districts with the college enrollment picture, but that is only part of the equation.
To help fill this gap, our team has leaned on national and state research that speaks to the long-term outcomes of students when they participate in different programs of study. One such example is this CTE longitudinal study conducted by UT Austin that found that the 3 categories of industry-based certificate attainment that promote the greatest odds of postsecondary success are Info Tech, Health Science, and Business when considering both college enrollment and workforce outcomes / wage attainment (see screenshot below). Other regional research in Texas has reinforced these findings.
Community Interest
To help capture the voice of students and parents, we have helped multiple districts design and analyze parent and student surveys to help inform the POS the district should offer. In an effort to also educate families on these programs and their outcomes as they provide input, we have learned to provide digestible information on the outcomes of these programs of study in these surveys (e.g., common occupations, median wages, job growth).
Internal District Data
While we mentioned earlier that districts do not often have access to their own workforce outcomes data to evaluate the effectiveness of their offerings, we have been able to take other district data such as the following as inputs into POS decisions:
Completer Status - what programs and courses promote deeper engagement from students such that they take multiple courses in this program and become completers? What courses are “dead ends” and do not lead to completer status?
Certification attainment - what POS promote certification attainment for students?
College enrollment - using National Student Clearinghouse data, what POS seem to promote higher college enrollment rates?
If you are interested in talking with our team to learn more about how we support districts with POS decisions and CTE more generally, please reach out to noa@contigoed.org!
