How Shop Class Can Boost College Enrollment

College isn’t for everyone, many argue. But what is the alternative? An old idea is to train kids in a trade in high school via shop class. However, high school trade programs have had a deservedly bad reputation as a “dumping ground” for low-income students, providing a subpar education and failing to prepare young adults for the modern world. These classes are also bound up with a shameful racial history. When schools were forced to desegregate, many funneled Black students into vocational tracks to keep them apart from white students under the same roof.

High school shop programs have changed a lot over the past 20 years, both by increasing their academic rigor and expanding career fields, from construction and cosmetology to information technology and healthcare. Federal legislation has encouraged these programs to prepare students not only for a career, but also for college. Labels have changed too. It’s now called career and technical education and often abbreviated as CTE. Today, students are actively choosing, instead of being passively steered to shop classes, and white students are more likely to opt for a high school shop program than Black students.

Massachusetts has been at the forefront of this trend. Four years of math are typically required of vocational students along with the option to take challenging honors classes and calculus, and the state spends about $3,000 more per vocational student a year, according to a September 2022 analysis. Shop programs are more costly to run because they require expensive equipment and spacious classrooms, and the hands-on instruction also means smaller classes. Schools usually need to hire more teachers to serve the same number of students.

In recent decades, student performance at Massachusetts high schools dedicated to career and technical education has surpassed traditional high schools, according to a May 2022 book, “Hands-On Achievement: Massachusetts’s National Model Vocational-Technical Schools,” published by the free market research organization Pioneer Institute. Both test scores and graduation rates were higher.

It’s hard to conclude from raw data if students are really better off with shop training in high school and whether it’s worth the extra taxpayer expense to run these programs. In Massachusetts, many vocational schools are extremely popular and have long waiting lists. They’re akin to magnet schools that admit the strongest students with unblemished attendance records and high grades. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that strong students might continue to thrive at a high caliber vocational school.

Now a pair of academic researchers from Florida State University and Vanderbilt University have analyzed the Massachusetts experiment in career and technical education by following students seven years after graduating high school in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Thanks to detailed school records, the researchers were able to compare students of the same race or ethnicity, family income and most importantly, with the same eighth grade test scores, grades and attendance records. The only difference was that some had career training in high school while others took traditional high school courses.

The biggest surprise was that college going rates were higher for students in five career categories: healthcare, education, information technology, arts/communications and business. For example, 77 percent of the students who specialized in healthcare enrolled in college within seven years of graduating high school. That’s 15 percentage points higher than similar students who had a traditional high school education.

“There’s nursing programs and allied health programs at community colleges that clearly follow after a student’s healthcare classes in high school,” said Walter Ecton, an assistant professor of education at Florida State University and lead author of the study, Heterogeneity in High School Career and Technical Education Outcomes, published in August 2022 in the peer-reviewed journal of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. “Students have a clear pathway and a clear track that they’re putting themselves on.”

Seven years after high school graduation, these career students’ salaries were higher too. For example, healthcare students earned $5,491 more annually than their traditional high school counterparts.

By contrast, college going rates were considerably worse for two career fields: construction and transportation, an area that includes auto repair. Students who specialized in construction fields in high school were five percentage points less likely to go to college than similar traditional high school students.

On the bright side, construction had the highest earnings premium after seven years. Students who studied construction earned $7,698 more annually seven years after high school graduation than similar students who had a traditional high school education. The earnings premium for transportation students diminished from over $6,000 (four years after graduation) to under $5,000 (seven years after graduation) as traditional high school students started to catch up.

“Students who go into construction, they are earning more, at least for the first seven years after high school graduation than we might otherwise expect, and quite a bit more,” Ecton said. “But they’re also much less likely to go to college than we might otherwise expect. I think that that’s a difficult tradeoff. Different students and families and counselors might make different choices here.” Ecton’s bigger point is that all career and technical education isn’t the same. “We wanted to understand if certain career pathways are paying off more,” he said. “It’s not a simple yes or no answer. It matters which field you’re going into.”

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services