"Eight years after their expected graduation date, students who focused on career and technical education (CTE) courses while in high school had higher median annual earnings than students who did not focus on CTE."
Bridging the Skills Gap: Career and Technical Education in High School - SEPTEMBER 2019 | U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
According to the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE), "Today’s cutting-edge, rigorous and relevant career and technical education (CTE) prepares youth and adults for a wide range of high-wage, high-skill, high-demand careers."
In May of 2022, research.com published statistics that state only 36% of students graduate with a college degree, 4 years after high school graduation.
What happens to the other 64%?
Every 64 students out of 100 in a graduating class are not accounted for in today's system.
Mistakenly, CTE has historically been seen as an alternative for those students who plan to enter the workforce as opposed to attending college after high school. That is not to suggest that all students must attend college after high school, but nothing could be further form the truth about CTE.
CTE pathways, or rebranding as CEP Career Education Pathways, serve to engage students in careers they are fundamentally interested in pursuing - nothing more AND nothing less. This can be done while simultaneously fulfilling 4-year college requirements.
In other words, CEP is the future of education - in particular increasingly digital workplace.
The modern workplace has experienced a seismic shift, one that was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, there will always be careers that require a college education or professional certificate. For example, jobs in education, medicine, law, etc. However, increasingly employers are searching for workers that they can train and shape for emerging professions - new kinds of jobs that have never existed before. Young people that have honed their executive functioning skills and therefore have the ability to learn more specific skills on the job.
This is not relegated to "blue collar" or low-skilled jobs. In fact, the opposite is true. Highly-skilled and high-earning jobs of the future are increasingly less dependent on the completion of a 4-year college degree. Without too much effort any of us can list names of the most successful people in history who either did not attend college or dropped out to pursue a job, start-up, idea, or calling they were interested in! Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, to name a few.
Additionally, some industries are more interested in what future employees can do, evidenced by what they have done, than they are a degree or certificate. IT companies regularly hire students in and or just out of high school who have proven they can be an asset to the company.
Ironically, the true essence of CEP is less about jobs and more about community. CEP are consciously linked to opportunities and careers in students' surrounding area, as opposed to those requiring individuals to relocate, bolster and stabilize the local economy and community.
Students who engage in CEP in high school are more likely to be actively employed 8 years after graduation and earning more than their non-CEP classmates ultimately serving to stabilize local communities.
The goal of this course is to set you up for success in first designing, then implementing and funding, your ideal career education pathway program! All three steps are critical to the success of your program. A thoughtful design, one that is linked to local apprenticeship opportunities, will lay the foundation for your pathway. Once we have the design we will walk through the rollout and ongoing funding strategies to not only help your CTE program sustain but scale and grow!
Let's jump in!
