Accelerating CTE Evaluation Case Studies
May 15, 2019
The Accelerating CTE project began as an extension of JFF’s Accelerating Opportunity (AO), a seven-year initiative to improve outcomes for adult education students in college. Building on the lessons learned and strong evidence realized in AO, the ECMC Foundation in 2016 invested in a three-year initiative where JFF partnered with five community colleges to extend student success strategies beyond the original adult education system to career and technical education (CTE) classrooms, where many students who are underprepared for college-level coursework struggle to succeed.
This report provides a summary of the Accelerating CTE demonstration project and details student outcomes and college lessons learned.
The primary research question was this: Is participation in an integrated Accelerating CTE program associated with improved persistence, completion, and credentialing rates compared to baseline CTE program outcomes? The evaluation found that, overall, colleges participating in Accelerating CTE were able to improve student persistence and completion in CTE career pathway programs.
During the evaluation period, which ran from the summer of 2015 until the fall of 2018, Accelerating CTE served a total of 1,228 students across all pathways and colleges.1 During that time frame, 72 percent of the participating students earned one credential while 14 percent earned two or more. In comparison, the colleges served 757 students during the baseline period2 and 69 percent of those students earned one credential while less than 2 percent earned two or more credentials.
