During times of economic downturn, people often turn to community colleges for rapid upskilling or reskilling to either find a new job or more firmly secure the one they have. These adult students—called “skills builders”—typically have no intention of completing a college degree or certificate, instead hoping that a handful of career and technical education (CTE) courses will help them adopt a more stable career pathway and net higher wages. Unfortunately, these hopes don’t always line up with reality.

Furthermore, popular narratives about upskilling and reskilling are contradictory. Some suggest that short sequences of CTE coursework are sufficient to set up many students for success in the workforce. Others contend that, for most students, college credentials are necessary. Which is true?

Additionally, most of today’s colleges don’t even define skills builders as a population of interest, let alone measure, report, or understand the outcomes of their coursework, even though they make up about one out of every eight new community college students.

WestEd and the University of Michigan, national leaders in research, development, and service, are working hard to get answers and provide guidance to help students and colleges close these gaps.

Guidance to Help Students Succeed

With the help of a two-year grant from ECMC Foundation, WestEd and the University of Michigan collaborated with The National Center for Inquiry and Improvement to conduct research identifying and investigating pathways for skills builders in Colorado and Ohio.

Their goals? To gain knowledge that will help academic institutions identify students who are skills builders; develop course offerings that are well aligned with the regional labor market, offer a stable living wage, and lead to opportunities to earn in-demand academic credentials in future years; and tailor student advising to address equity gaps. 

“It’s important to get a better understanding of how community colleges are supporting adult learners, particularly given that there’s a demographic shift resulting in fewer young people of college age and an urgent need to provide upskilling opportunities for the two-thirds of adults who don’t have a college degree,” said Kathy Booth, Director, WestEd Center for Economic Mobility. 

“We also want to provide empirical information to help people understand the role of skills-building in economic mobility, including who benefits and how it relates to earning a living wage,” said Peter Riley Bahr, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education.

During the research study, the team used data from the Ohio and Colorado community college systems and matched earning records from the state Unemployment Insurance databases to answer the question: Can upskilling/reskilling lift individuals who are living in poverty up to a self-sustaining wage?

What They’ve Learned

“The research showed that upskilling/reskilling often pays off for students in increased earnings—but the payoff is rarely enough to lift a student from poverty up to a living wage,” explained Dr. Bahr. “In addition, students who are already facing significant obstacles tend to get smaller earnings gains from upskilling and reskilling, including students who enter college under adverse economic circumstances (like a job loss) and students who have no prior college education at all. The bottom line: upskilling and reskilling are not substitutes for a high-quality college credential that is aligned with employers’ needs and labor market demand.”

The team also learned that absolute wage increases are inversely related to students’ wages prior to entering college. In other words, the lower the person’s wages entering college, the bigger their increases after college, on average—a reflection of how even a few thousand additional dollars can make a significant difference for people living close to the poverty line.

Aside from this knowledge, the research provided new insights on how to help community colleges support skills builders.

“Our research gave us a clear window into the need to help colleges understand how skills-building fits into regional labor markets,” said Ms. Booth. “For example, we found that courses like Python and Intermediate Excel were taken by many skills builders; but colleges rarely build time into classes to helping students understand the diverse career paths that utilize those skills. Or they could help students better understand alternative skills-related pathways in other industries, such as moving from medical assisting to administrative assistant, if there’s a strong market for those jobs in the community, with opportunities for advancement with less training.”

Early Outcomes and Recommendations

As a result of the research work, WestEd and the University of Michigan are delivering valuable knowledge with promising implications. Here are a few examples:

• Commitment to review: They’ve emphasized the importance of colleges reviewing workforce outcomes of short-term course sequences, and disaggregating them by income status, prior education, gender, age, race and ethnicity, which is currently not a universal practice.
• Evaluation of course sequences: They’ve been able to pinpoint which course sequences made a difference for various populations, so that colleges could do a better job of articulating the value of skills building to those populations—and also identify who isn’t benefiting from skills building.
• Better understanding of outcomes: They’ve been able to introduce dozens of colleges to a factual understanding of the outcomes of short-term course-taking and developed a methodology that can be easily replicated by states and colleges.
• Concrete data to guide policy: They’ve developed a sophisticated analytical foundation from which to answer critical and highly time-sensitive policy questions.

Today, the collective team is working simultaneously on a full technical paper and a policy brief. They’re also in conversation with a number of new partner states to extend and expand this study with the goal of providing tools to help them understand their upskilling/reskilling students and measure progress in retaining these students or bringing them back to complete a high-quality credential.

WestEd is also working with the Centers of Excellence for Labor Market Research and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland on developing skills-focused pathways, such as determining how hospitality workers in the northern part of California—an area that has been decimated by wildfires—can retrain for in-demand jobs in allied health. The team is also partnering with other nonprofits and research organizations to develop shared messaging on how to better understand current labor market trends given the desire to secure living wage jobs without a degree.

“I’ve really enjoyed watching the light go on as people make the connection between this research and their work,” said Ms. Booth, who recalls a recent example.

“I led a session in Ohio with college practitioners about better explaining skills-builder opportunities to potential students,” she said. “There’s a big Intel plant being built outside of Columbus, so we used the example of ‘Your neighbor wants to work at Intel. What courses would you encourage them to take and how would they find that information on your website?’ Folks in the room realized they didn’t know what those jobs really were and that their websites were not designed to make that type of information available. By focusing on both the skills that people in the community have and the competencies required for specific jobs, the educators generated a lot of ideas for ways to make those options clearer, while helping address Intel’s goal of hiring more women and people of color.”

The Work Continues

While the early research and insights are intriguing, there’s more work to do. Today, WestEd and the University of Michigan continue to partner to conduct more research and share findings as part of a broader messaging campaign.

“Being able to put concrete definitions to amorphous but ubiquitous words like upskilling and reskilling, and putting a face to skills-builder students, is greatly facilitating meaningful policy and practice conversations about this sizeable but poorly understood segment of the student population,” said Dr. Bahr.

“Five years from now, I hope that we will have helped people move beyond the rhetoric that you don’t need a degree to clarifying for learners where those short-term pathways to living-wage work are and what the working conditions of those jobs are like,” explained Dr. Bahr.

By seeking to understand who benefits from skills-builder course taking—including differences among races and ethnicities—and how postsecondary institutions can help these learners continue on to earn a credential or advance in their career, WestEd’s work directly supports ECMC Foundation’s North Star goal to eliminate equity gaps in postsecondary completion by 2040, so that underserved learners have greater opportunity for social and economic mobility.