Washington – While four-year colleges are often presented as the best way into the middle class, more consideration should be given to career and technical education alternatives that lead to “middle jobs” paying good wages without requiring a bachelor’s degree.
That’s one of the major points made in a new report titled Career and Technical Education: Five Ways That Pay.
Dr. Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center on Education and Workforce and lead author of the report, said career and technical education, commonly referred to as CTE, represents a series of missing rungs on the ladder of post-secondary education.
“We go from high school to Harvard,” Carnevale said. “That’s always been the American system. There [are] too many rungs in between that are just not there.”
Those missing rungs, according to the report, fall into five broad categories: associate’s degrees; postsecondary certificates; registered apprenticeships; industry-based certifications and employer-based training.
“We need to focus more on alternative pathways to college for students who are less advantaged,” Carnevale said. “We know that programs that have strong applied focus, like career and technical education, that those programs prevent dropouts from high school; they improve math scores” and improve the chances of going onto post-secondary and training.
But those who emphasize these five alternative options run the political risk of being seen having a socioeconomic bias, Carnevale said.
