The Evolution of Career and Technical Education, 1982-2013

Career and technical education (CTE) is one of the most popular education policy issues today, both across the states and at the federal level. CTE's surging popularity has been bolstered by good public relations and research that push back on the stigma long associated with CTE. After a successful rebranding, CTE has substantially shed the negative connotations of vocational education. Now it is widely hailed as a necessary and potentially viable path forward for students who have been poorly served by a college-for-all culture. In this report, Nat Malkus examines 30 years of CTE course taking by examining transcripts of nationally representative samples of US high school graduates in selected years from 1982 to 2013. Using a classification of CTE occupational subject areas used in the most recently available transcript data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Malkus shows how CTE course taking has changed over that period, overall and by concentration. In addition, he uses test scores to show changes in the relative academic level of CTE concentrators. He finds marked declines in CTE course taking over these three decades, declines that are larger and longer than previously detailed. Beneath that overall decline lie different patterns: Some CTE career concentrations are expanding and have participants with markedly higher test scores, while other concentrations, which are traditionally considered the heart of vocational education, are declining slowly and show no changes in participants' low relative test scores.