Today ACTE and Advance CTE released the 11th annual State Policies Impacting CTE: Year in Review report, marking the start of a second decade of insights into CTE policy trends at the state and national levels.
In 2023, 47 states enacted 115 policies affecting CTE and career readiness, including legislation, executive orders and budget provisions. This marks the second-highest number of states in a single year to act on CTE policy, surpassed only by the landmark year of 2017 when all 50 states implemented CTE-related policies.
Each year, the Year in Review report analyzes policy trends across the nation, offers state examples for the top five policy categories, and highlights one rapidly growing policy area.
Policymakers connected to CTE can use this resource to see trend areas from across the country over time and explore past and present CTE policies that might be replicable in their state. This resource strives to empower leaders to build on current innovations, advocate for effective policies, and drive positive change in CTE.
In addition to the report, the following resources provide additional insights into this publication:
- Advance CTE and ACTE’s Year in Review webinar on February 21 from 3-4 p.m. ET will provide an overview into the impactful policy trends and innovative legislation from 2023 that will impact millions of CTE learners across 47 states as well as present a deep dive on CTE policy in Utah with Utah State CTE Director Thalea Longhurst and Utah ACTE representative Becky Cox.
- An expanded State Policy Tracker includes final legislative, budget and executive actions connected to CTE since 2013!
ACTE and Advance CTE have released the second set in a new series of joint publications that address how to support each of the nine Perkins V special populations and other underserved learner groups.
The Maximizing Access & Success for Special Populations in CTE series features strategies, reflection questions and case studies for supporting each special population as well as other learner groups that have been a focus of state and local support.
Part II, released last week, features briefs on supporting the following populations:
These publications join the first briefs in this series, including an introduction as well as briefs on nontraditional learners, foster youth and out-of-workforce individuals.
A final set of briefs describing how to support additional populations will be released in March.
From Setback to Success: Meeting Comebackers Where They Are: The California Competes organization recently published a report as a guide for helping institutions support and recruit more comebacker students: individuals who left college with no credential and later returned to and completed postsecondary education. In California alone, over 6 million adults have participated in postsecondary education but have yet to earn a credential. Researchers spoke with over 52 adult learners who dropped out, reenrolled and went on to earn a degree.
The following list details some key strategies that institutions can employ to help these students:
- Remove reenrollment barriers by providing priority registration status upon return, offering credit for prior learning and forgiving institutional debt.
- Provide ongoing support initiatives like adult-focused advising, accessible online resources and communities of support with other comebackers.
- Adapt to shifting student needs by offering increased access to shortened-term programs and fully online courses.
- Conduct outreach to students who stopped out of college about the reenrollment process, use inclusive marketing materials and provide more academic probation flexibility.
How States and Systems Can Support Practitioner Efforts to Strengthen Dual Enrollment: The Community College Research Center recently published a report in conjunction with the College in High School Alliance that provides evidence-based recommendations for states and systems on how to strengthen dual enrollment (DE). Experts provide insights into three areas of DE improvement: increasing access, strengthening on-ramps to postsecondary education and building strong partnerships.
Some top insights and recommendations are below:
- Set statewide DE goals and provide easy-to-use public data platforms for practitioners to track recent progress.
- Reform eligibility requirements for DE to reduce barriers to participation, including shifting away from placement testing to high school grades to increase access.
- Reduce tuition and non-tuition costs for low-income families through public funding and emphasize the potential cost savings of DE toward postsecondary tuition.
- Prioritize open access to navigational supports to increase postsecondary-going motivation, especially for underrepresented students.
Strategies to Advise Students on Multiple Postsecondary Pathways: A recently published report by the Education Strategy Group in collaboration with the Walton Family Foundation provided insights to practitioners on how to support multiple postsecondary pathways and information for students and families to help them understand the full suite of career pathways that can lead to success after graduation.
Researchers identified key challenges of data, capacity and partnerships. They also provided the following recommendations:
- Employ technology for disseminating messages at scale and for increasing capacity to individualized supports to communicate with students and families where they are.
- Directly engage students to ensure that messaging resonates with real-world learners.
- Re-conceptualize who can serve as an advisor to students and provide training.
- Incorporate and analyze data on local labor market opportunities, needs and student outcomes to ensure high-quality advising.
ACTE has released CTE: Developing the Aerospace and Defense Workforce, the latest in our revamped series of Sector Sheets describing CTE’s role in growing the workforce for vital industry sectors. The Sector Sheet series is published with support from ACTE’s long-time partner Pearson.
These revised Sector Sheets include job opportunities in each sector and descriptions of how CTE prepares learners for the workforce in each sector, all in a new format featuring more streamlined text and additional graphics to make these advocacy tools even more effective.
This Sector Sheet describes how CTE supports the aerospace and defense workforce, which employs more than 2.2 million people nationwide and supports commercial, military and national defense activities. It also shares information on occupations, earnings and credentials that enable individuals to enter and progress within fields such as commercial aerospace, cyber systems and unmanned systems. Finally, the Sector Sheet demonstrates the importance of CTE in developing this workforce by describing how CTE prepares learners through courses, industry credentials, work-based learning, career and technical student organizations and more.
As we move forward with the revamped Sector Sheets, both the newer and older Sector Sheets will remain available on the ACTE Sector Sheet webpage for download and use. We encourage you to share these tools with students, families, counselors, policymakers and others to spread the message about CTE and its benefits for learners and the workforce.
While 51% of secondary CTE concentrators were learners of color in 2021–22, only 13% of CTE educators in public schools were people of color in 2020–21. Today, ACTE and Advance CTE released a new report, State and Local Strategies for Diversifying the CTE Educator Workforce (full report and executive summary), that presents common challenges to diversifying the educator workforce, identifies promising practices in the field to overcome these challenges, and provides actionable strategies and recommendations to assist state and local CTE leaders in strategically planning and developing policies and practices to increase diversity in the CTE workforce.
A companion resource, Recruiting Diverse Educators: A Database of Organizations Representing Underserved Populations, presents a contact list of organizations that serve minority populations, including industry professionals, learners, and current and future educators of color. The list offers a starting point for local, regional and state CTE leaders looking to develop the educator pipeline and recruit educators from under-represented populations to teach in CTE.
This work was generously funded by the Joyce Foundation.
ACTE and Advance CTE will be hosting an in-person preconference workshop on this topic on May 1, 2024, at the ACTE Region I conference in New York City. You do not need to register for the entire conference to take part!
Variation in Community College Funding Levels: The Urban Institute recently published a report on varying levels of community college funding across the nation and the impact on historically underserved groups. Researchers discovered no evidence of systemic differences across the nation in state and local funding for community colleges that serve more Black, Hispanic and/or low-income students relative to other demographic groups. However, the analysts caution that equal funding may not be sufficient to ensure access and supports for all learners.
More findings and insights below:
- States that rely on local sources of funding for community colleges also have more funding overall.
- Some states intentionally change levels of funding based on factors like institution size, potentially leading to funding differences among demographic groups attending smaller versus larger institutions.
- On average, rural institutions receive over $1,000 more per student in state funding than urban and suburban institutions.
- About 44% of public undergraduate students attend community colleges, ranging from 24% in South Dakota and Montana to 67% in California.
Policy Changes to Maximize Community College Workforce Development: The American Enterprise Institute recently released a report that explores the role of the community college system by analyzing how successful institutions across the nation are fulfilling their workforce development potential. Researchers concluded that institutional effectiveness varies greatly by location and that more scaling and standardization of evidence-based practices is needed for improved student outcomes.
The analysts recommend a national framework that does the following:
- Mandatorily places community colleges at the center of state workforce development efforts.
- Enacts short-term Pell-eligible noncredit programs that provide learners with healthy earnings boosts.
- Invests in state offices similar to the , which focuses on compiling regional labor market and supply-and-demand trends.
- Publishes outcomes for noncredit programs.
- Further promotes work-based learning.
Career Navigation in a Time of Rapid Change: A report recently published by the Harvard Kennedy School analyzed the current practice of career navigation to set an agenda for a more equitable ecosystem that can lead to improved career and wage outcomes for underrepresented and economically disadvantaged individuals. Analysts found that in 2019 approximately 53 million people in the United States were working low-wage jobs with median earnings of $24,000 annually and suggested solutions in which CTE plays a crucial role in changing the status quo.
The following list includes recommended best practices for a more equitable career navigation system:
- Increase access to stackable credentials, which can lead to a 20% increase in wages for working adults and can help narrow the middle- and high-income earnings gap.
- Increase access to American Job Centers, which provide assessment, coaching and service referrals and can lead to earnings growth of between 7% and 20%.
- Encourage corporate policies that support employee reskilling efforts to provide underrepresented workers with more open doors for upward mobility.
- Build community partnerships and develop trust with marginalized populations to co-create solutions with community leaders like the embedded career navigator program in Oakland, California.
Overall postsecondary enrollment in fall 2022 continued to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic, led by community colleges.
Enrollment across the entire postsecondary sector declined by 0.4% from fall 2021 to fall 2022 – a smaller decline than the decrease seen from fall 2020 to fall 2021 and much less than the approximately 3% decline during the pandemic. However, for public community colleges, enrollment increased by 0.4% to 6.1 million students, according to an analysis by the American Association of Community Colleges of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data.
Enrollment growth was greatest among non-degree-seeking students, which may be due to bumps in the number of dually enrolled learners.
In addition, recent IPEDS data also showed the following:
- In fiscal year 2022, almost 49% of expenses at Title IV public less-than-two-year institutions went toward instruction, compared to 36% for public two-year institutions and 25% at public four-year institutions.
- There were nearly 36,000 instructors at public two-year institutions in academic year 2022-23, earning an average salary of approximately $76,000 per year.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) recently published multiple data sets looking at undergraduate admissions and learner outcomes, teacher turnover, staffing vacancies and post-pandemic learning recovery.
Data on Secondary Staffing Vacancies and Learning Recovery: NCES published a set of data from the School Pulse Panel (SPP) from October 2023 featuring more than 1,400 schools across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The findings focused on public school staffing vacancies, learning recovery and tutoring programs.
CTE was among the subject areas with the highest percentage of vacancies, at 5%, along with ESL or bilingual education (5%) and special education (6%). In addition, schools reported needing to have non-teaching staff take on other duties (42%), needing to have teaching staff take on other duties (40%), increased class sizes (28%) and sharing staff and/or teachers with other schools (24%).
When investigating post-pandemic learning, researchers found that 44% of students did not begin the 2023-24 school year at grade level in at least one academic subject, showing improvement from the 49% reported at the start of the prior school year.
Data on Undergraduate Students: The Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS) has released a collection of data sets on recent admissions and outcomes trends.
- Admissions:
- In fall 2022 institutions reported receiving more than 13.1 million first-time applicants, up from 12.1 million in fall 2021.
- Institutions admitted almost 60% of the first-time postsecondary applicants they received in fall 2022.
- Only 26 institutions indicated that work experience is required for admission.
- Outcomes:
- 23% of full-time, first-time enrolled in two-year institutions in 2018 graduated within two years, up to 41% within four years.
- 31% of students in the 2014-15 cohort had earned a degree or certificate within eight years.
Data on Teacher Turnover: NCES recently published a set of selected findings from the National Teacher and Principal Survey Teacher Follow-up Survey, which included over 8,500 public school teachers and looked at teacher turnover between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years. Analysts found that 84% remained at the same school, 8% moved to a different school and 8% left the profession all together.
In addition, among former teachers who voluntarily left the profession, 16% retired, 15% left for personal reasons, 13% left to pursue another position outside of K-12 teaching and 9% left for salary reasons.
ACTE and Advance CTE have released the first set in a new series of joint publications that address how to support each of the nine Perkins V special populations and other underserved learner groups.
The Maximizing Access & Success for Special Populations in CTE series features strategies, reflection questions and case studies for supporting each special population as well as other key populations that have been a focus of state and local support.
Part I, released last week, includes an introduction to the series and briefs on supporting the following special populations:
A second set of briefs describing how to support additional populations will be released in February.
This week, Congress attempted to wrap up their work for the year ahead of their target adjournment date. The annual National Defense Authorization Act was passed by both chambers, but negotiations continue on an emergency international aid package for Israel and Ukraine. The House has now adjourned for the holiday break while the Senate delayed its recess in hopes of getting a deal through. More news and notes below:
- Senate HELP Committee Approves Education Sciences Reform Act Reauthorization: This week, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee voted to approve the Advancing Research in Education Act (S.3392), which amends the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) that has not been touched by Congress since 2002. This new ESRA bill includes CTE more overtly and focuses on both the education and workforce outcomes of students. Read more on the CTE Policy Watch Blog.
- House Education and Workforce Committee Approves WIOA Reauthorization and Short-term Pell Legislation: The House and Education Workforce Committee voted to approve a reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and a bill to extend Pell grants to short-term programs. Read more about WIOA on the CTE Policy Watch Blog here and short-term Pell here.
- NCES Releases Data on Public School Teachers, Highlighting Rates of Professionals Exiting the Field: The National Center for Education Statistics has released a set of selected findings from its Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS). This week’s data release announced that approximately 8% of teachers left the profession in 2021, a rate unchanged from a decade earlier.
- NCES Releases Data on Outcomes and Graduation Rates for Students at Postsecondary Institutions: The National Center for Education Statistics has released a set of provisional data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which discovered that at least 31% of students attending a 2-year institution in school year 2014-15 earned a degree or a certificate within 8 years after initial enrollment, representing an increase from school year 2013-14.
- Department of Energy Launches New Office to Coordinate Critical and Emerging Technologies: The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the launch of the Office of Critical and Emerging Technology to coordinate efforts in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, quantum computing and semiconductors.
- Department of Labor Announced Proposed Rulemaking to Modernize Registered Apprenticeship Regulations: The Department of Labor (DOL) has announced that it will propose new regulations related to the National Apprenticeship System. The proposed rule includes stronger labor standards and workers protections, better defined roles for state apprenticeship agencies, better promotion of apprenticeship pathways and the creation of a student centric model of registered apprenticeship, among other things. It also contains new connections to CTE programs, which we will be analyzing carefully!
