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

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.