Educational Stakeholder Sensemaking on Preparing CTE Students for Sub-Baccalaureate Pathways

Oct 15, 2026

Careful implementation of Career and Technical Education (CTE) is required to meet policy goals of college- and career-readiness: expanding students’ access to career-relevant learning while preserving preparation for postsecondary degrees. As CTE spreads, limited research explains how practitioners interpret CTE’s intended outcomes. Interviews and observations with 52 education leaders and workforce partners show stakeholders valued CTE for offering lower-risk routes to middle-skill careers without bachelor’s degrees, but some overstated long-term returns of sub-baccalaureate credentials, giving students misleading information for planning postsecondary goals.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages35

Reading Time1 h 28 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Context and Policy Rationale

CTE as an Alternative to “College for All”

Study Purpose and Key Findings

Stakeholder Sensemaking of CTE Goals

Implementation Context

State Policy Changes and ESSA Flexibility

Research Approach

Case Study in a Pennsylvania Semi-Rural Region

Educational Stakeholder Sensemaking on Preparing CTE Students for Sub-Baccalaureate Pathways Educational Policy 2023, Vol. 37(6) 1700–1734 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[DOI: 10.1177/08959048221120277](DOI: 10.1177/08959048221120277) [journals.sagepub.com/home/epx](journals.sagepub.com/home/epx) Sarah Cashdollar 1 Abstract Careful implementation of Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs is necessary in order for programs to achieve the policy goal of college and career readiness, which involves expanding student opportunities for career-relevant learning without limiting their academic preparation for postsecondary degrees. As programs become more widespread, little work has examined how practitioners actually implementing CTE make sense of programs’ intended outcomes. Through interviews and observations with 52 education leaders and their partners in workforce development, I found that education stakeholders believed CTE was important for providing students with the option to pursue financially low-risk pathways toward middle-skill careers that didn’t require bachelor’s degrees. Yet in their efforts to valorize sub-baccalaureate (sub-BA) pathways, they sometimes exaggerated the long-term returns to sub-BA credentials, leaving students with inaccurate information on which to base their postsecondary goals. Keywords educational equity, policy adaptation, rural education, secondary education 1 University of Illinois, Chicago, USA Corresponding Author: Sarah Cashdollar, Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative, Discovery Partners Institute, University of Illinois, 200 S. Wacker Dr., 20th Floor, Chicago, IL 60606, USA. Email: [secash@uillinois.edu](secash@uillinois.edu) “We want fewer students going to college.” – District Superintendent As educators and policymakers grapple with preparing youth for careersin a technologically advancing economic landscape, enthusiasm is growing for widespread Career and Technical Education (CTE) . The “CTE” label signals a transition from the low-quality job training for non-college-bound students that characterized vocational education of the past. Instead, the CTE model combines broad technical learning with high academic rigor and an increased emphasis on readiness for postsecondary education. As imagined by policymakers, CTE provides pathways for students to pursue a range of postsecondary certificates, associate degrees, and other sub-baccalaureate credentials in addition to bachelor’s degrees (BAs) . At the same time, CTE has been hailed as an alternative to “college for all” (CFA) approaches to educational equity, which have been criticized as upholding an overly narrow vision of postsecondary success premised on BA attainment (Rosenbaum, 2001) . In response to the growing interest in and support for CTE, researchers have called for attention to the ways participation in CTE programs dismantles and/or reproduces stratification in students’postsecondary outcomes (Hodge et al., 2020; Puckett & Gravel, 2020) . Despite the centrality to CTE policy of ensuring students are prepared to pursue any level of higher education, the current study shows that those enacting CTE in schools may have very different conceptions ofCTE’s purpose and design. Findings are based on interviews and observations with comprehensive high school leaders, including superintendents, principals, assistant principals, and school counselors, along with their partners in industry and workforce development. Results show that many of these education stakeholders felt a primary goal of CTE was to help students, particularly those from low-income households, explore and prepare for careers that did not require a 4-year degree. At the most extreme, some school leaders went so far as to set a goal to have fewer graduates enrolling in 4-year college. This goa

FAQs

What policy goal motivates careful implementation of CTE programs?

CTE implementation is necessary to achieve college and career readiness by expanding students’ opportunities for career-relevant learning without limiting their academic preparation for postsecondary degrees.

How do education stakeholders interpret the purpose of CTE in the study?

Many leaders see CTE as helping students, especially those from low-income households, explore and prepare for careers that do not require a four-year degree, and in some cases they aim to reduce enrollment in four-year colleges.

What problem can arise when stakeholders valorize sub-baccalaureate pathways?

Stakeholders sometimes exaggerate the long-term returns to sub-baccalaureate credentials, which can leave students with inaccurate information when setting postsecondary goals.

Oct 15, 2026

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