Career-Technical Education Research News

Catherine Oleksiw, primary author of “Community College Noncredit Occupational Programming: A Study of State Policies and Funding,” recently spoke to Catherine Imperatore of the ACTE about this recent NRCCTE study, which inventoried state policies and regulations on and financial support for noncredit occupational programming offered by community colleges. Information collected from state- and community college-level administrators and Web-based searches was organized according to a range of issues related to noncredit occupational programming and funding, such as definitions for noncredit; cat­egories of noncredit courses; development and delivery of programming, including content stan­dards, instructor qualifications, and noncredit-to-credit course transfer; state-level collection of noncredit programming data; state funding mechanisms for noncredit courses; and contract train­ing. The study also laid the groundwork for further research on the impact of community college noncredit programming policies and funding on course availability and accessibility, business and industry partnerships, and reporting mechanisms and data systems for noncredit programming.

Here’s an excerpt from their conversation:

CO: We had a number of recommendations, a lot of which focused on gathering more information because this was an exploratory study. It had never been done on this scale before. What is interesting, though, is that at the same time this study was being done, it was done through the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education, the Community College Research Center at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, was doing the same study, in the sense that we were gathering a lot of the same information. It was serendipitous, and really a sign of the field, and business and industry and education seeing that we needed more information on this. So, both of the studies came out at about the same time, both equally rich in much information.

So our recommendations called for really assessing the overall impact of noncredit workforce development programming on business and industry, in a broad sense, looking from an economic perspective. Based on the programming, were there more skilled workers generated? Were they receiving higher salaries because of the added skills? Was it value-added? What was their work performance like?

Another recommendation was researching the administration structures in the development and delivery of content. Possibly creating a taxonomy to analyze the current structures and determining if there are any lessons to be learned from how the different structures might inform the field. Are some structures more effective at delivering content, and is there a relationship between state policies and administrative structure? So that’s a study in itself.

Read the transcript of this interview, the one-page Research Snapshot, or download the full research report.

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