Monday, March 27, 2017

Does High School CTE Participation Make a Difference in Predicting Community College Outcomes?

Authors, from left to right: Drs. Cecile Dietrich,
Eric Lichtenberger, and Rosemaliza Kamalludeen
Researchers at Radford University, the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the International Islamic University of Malaysia have published the results of a study entitled “Predicting Community College Outcomes: Does High School CTE Participation Have a Significant Effect?” in the Journal of Career and Technical Education. The authors, Cecile Dietrich, Eric Lichtenberger, and Rosemaliza Mohd Kamalludeen explored the relative importance of participation in high school career and technical education (CTE) programs in predicting community college outcomes using a hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM).

Results show that even after controlling for various pre-college and environmental factors, community college students who had participated in a high school CTE program were either just as likely or more than likely to attain all of the outcomes measured in the study when compared to students from general curriculum programs. Although high school CTE students who matriculated to community colleges were significantly less likely to transfer to a four-year college with or without a credential as compared with college prep students, they had significantly greater odds of earning an associate’s degree or a certificate.

Dietrich and Lichtenberger, the study’s lead authors, noted that “high school CTE participation may help facilitate goals related to the completion agenda which call for increasing the number of individuals with quality postsecondary credentials.”

Reading/Downloading Full Articles
The full version of this article may be accessed as part of Volume 31, Issue 1 (Winter 2016) of the Journal of Career and Technical Education, available at https://ejournals.lib.vt.edu/JCTE/article/view/1506

Submitting Manuscripts for Publication
To submit manuscripts and preparation guidelines, please visit the JCTE's page at https://ejournals.lib.vt.edu/JCTE/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions