A growing share of Ohio high school students are participating in career and technical education, according to a recent report from the Fordham Institute.
The education policy think tank found about a quarter of the state’s high schoolers participated in career and technical education during the 2022-2023 school year — up from one in six students a decade ago.
Aaron Churchill, the organization’s Ohio research director, says the increase has been driven by continued state investment and growing student demand.
“For the students who aren't planning to go to four-year college — which is the slight majority of our student population — they do need the skills to hop into a job that they can get a living wage and move up the ladder,” he said.
“So I think we're seeing greater interest among students in pursuing these opportunities and getting themselves ready for a career. And I think some of it is also reflective of our state leadership recognizing the importance of career education and readying more students for the jobs of tomorrow.”
What is career and technical education?
Career and technical education includes coursework focused on an occupational field.
Often, those fields are organized into career clusters, like engineering technology or health sciences. And within each cluster, students can take a specific path, like automotive technology.
“Students typically take a combination of coursework and will often do some work-based learning, like job shadowing or apprenticeships as well if they're fully in a career pathway program. And then increasingly part of these programs is receiving industry recognized credentials,” said Jay Plasman, the report’s author and an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Ecology at Ohio State University.
Many high schools in Ohio offer career and technical education, as do vocational schools and joint vocational school districts.
Who gets to participate?
The report found Ohio students across all races, income levels and geographic areas participate in career and technical education.
But low-income and Black students, especially in the state’s urban centers, are less likely to have access to education for high-priority career fields, like information technology or logistics and supply chain.
“If we continue to provide the best career tech to students from only certain areas of our state and not others, then I think you will see a workforce that is going to be negatively disproportionately available for our low-income and minority students,” Churchill said.
“I think that's something the state should continue to work on in terms of expanding access to these really great career opportunities and career technical programs that do lead to the best jobs and mostly demand jobs across the state.”
Is career and technical education preparing students for future jobs?
As of 2023, the most popular career and technical education pathways were in the fields of agriculture and health sciences.
Plasman says agriculture courses are popular across the country and encompass everything from agribusiness to forestry.
“And health sciences has popped up in the last decade or so and has really been growing a lot,” he said. “I think that there's been a lot of reporting about the need for more health care workers with the aging population.”
But other pathways see less interest, despite high demand (and high pay) for workers. For example, fewer Ohio students take courses in subjects like robotics, cybersecurity and manufacturing technologies like metallurgy.
“Ohio has really been a strong player in trying to bring in some of those big advanced manufacturing organizations to the state,” Plasman said. “So that's a big need. But the programming for that is not necessarily quite there.”
Plus, preparing students for in-demand jobs requires more than classroom training, Plasman and Churchill said.
The report found less than half of students in the class of 2023 who participated in career and technical education did job shadowing, an apprenticeship or any amount of work-based learning.
“We need to rethink and think of career technical education as an all-of-the-above type of endeavor where there's coursework involved, there's a credentialing component involved and a work-based learning component involved as well,” Churchill said.
