Upskilling and Reskilling
Many students enroll in community and technical colleges to take a few courses to reskill for new employment or upskill for career advancement with no intention of completing a college degree or certificate. Do these skills-building course sequences pay off for students, and, if so, which sequences and for whom? How can we help more students advance from high-value skills-building sequences to high(er)-value postsecondary credentials?
[SHEEO 2024 Presentation] Economic Returns to Up/Reskilling: Can Short Skills-Building Sequences in Community and Technical Colleges Yield a Living Wage?
2024
Peter Riley Bahr and Kathy Booth
Presentation at the 2024 SHEEO Higher Education Policy Conference
https://bit.ly/skillsbuilders_SHEEO2024
Enrollments in community and technical colleges surge in economic downturns, and many of these students are enrolling to reskill or upskill in order to find work, change jobs, or increase their employment opportunities or security. Popular narratives about upskilling and reskilling are contradictory. Some suggest that short sequences of career and technical education (CTE) coursework are sufficient to set up many students for success in the workforce. Others contend that, for most students, college credentials are necessary for long-term success in the workforce. Using data from the Colorado Community Colleges and matched earnings records from the Colorado Unemployment Insurace (UI) database, we answer the question, Can upskilling/reskilling lift individuals who are living in poverty up to a self-sustaining wage?
Topics: Upskilling and Reskilling; Education, Employment, and Earnings; Career and Technical Education
Economic Returns to Skills-Building: Can Short-Term Upskilling and Reskilling in Community Colleges Yield a Living Wage?
2024
Peter Riley Bahr, Yiran Chen, Ying Sun, Jennifer May-Trifiletti, and Kathy Booth
Ed Policy Research Working Paper 24-2
https://bit.ly/skillsbuilding_returns
We examine the labor market returns to upskilling/reskilling (skills-building) course combinations in community colleges, utilizing administrative data from the Colorado Community College System. Our findings affirm prior evidence of average increases in earnings following the completion of short up/reskilling sequences, and this holds true across a range of course sequences of differing lengths and in different fields of study. However, our findings also challenge notions that short-term up/reskilling can lift a large share of impoverished participants up to a self-sustaining income. Additionally, the study illuminates complexity in the factors that influence earnings gains from up/reskilling, including the participants’ prior educational attainment, participants’ demographic characteristics, and the field of study. Globally, the study underscores the need for nuanced policy approaches to short-term training in community colleges for low-income and economically displaced individuals.
Topics: Upskilling and Reskilling; Education, Employment, and Earnings; Career and Technical Education
Labor Market Returns to Community College Noncredit Occupational Education
2023
Peter Riley Bahr and Rooney Columbus
Ed Policy Research Working Paper 23-1
https://bit.ly/noncredit_returns
Millions of students enroll in community colleges noncredit programs every year—most in occupational training—but there are few large-scale studies of their effectiveness in increasing students’ employment opportunities and earnings. In this study, we applied individual fixed effects models to state longitudinal administrative data from Texas to estimate the labor market returns to community college noncredit occupational education. We find a modest but statistically significant increase in average quarterly earnings exceeding $500 per quarter (2019 dollars). Returns vary by duration of training, field of study, and number of training spells. Our findings speak to ongoing national policy debates about expansion of Pell Grant eligibility to include some community college noncredit programs, as well numerous state efforts to increase workforce readiness.
Topics: Noncredit Education; Education, Employment, and Earnings; Career and Technical Education; Upskilling and Reskilling
Community College Skills Builders: Prevalence, Characteristics, Behavior, and Outcomes of Successful Non-Completing Students Across Four States
2023
Peter Riley Bahr, Yiran Chen, and Rooney Columbus
Journal of Higher Education
https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2022.2082782
This study investigates community college skills builders—students who enroll for a short time, take courses concentrated in career and technical education (CTE), are highly successful in their coursework, but typically leave college without a postsecondary credential. Drawing on administrative data from Colorado, Ohio, Michigan, and California, we use k-means cluster analysis to identify a distinct group of skills builders in each state. We analyze their prevalence, characteristics, course-taking, and educational and labor market outcomes. We then develop criteria that state systems or individual institutions can use to identify skills builders in their student populations. Skills builders comprised similar proportions of students in each state, between 11 and 14 percent, and were qualitatively similar across states. Their average earnings were flat or trending downward prior to college but reversed after college, rising at a statistically significant rate. Fields of study and certificate completion rates among skills builders varied across states. Identifying skills builders will strengthen state and institutional efforts to communicate student successes that cannot be measured with credential completions, while also equipping institutions with the information needed to better serve skills builders.
Topics: Upskilling and Reskilling; Career and Technical Education
Identifying Skills Builders and Estimating Economic Returns to Skills-Building Course Sequences: A Research Methodology Guide
2023
Peter Riley Bahr, Kathy Booth, and Yiran Chen
WestEd Center for Economic Mobility
Recent research on skills builders—students who typically enroll in colleges for a short period of time, take and successfully complete a handful of career-oriented classes, and frequently translate their coursework into earning gains—has generated significant interest from researchers, policymakers, and educators on ways to identify these students in their own institutions and states. This guide provides research methodologies for identifying skills builders and determining the economic returns to short-term course-taking. In addition to providing methodologies for analysis, the guide includes sample discussion questions that community college practitioners can use to build a deeper understanding of student course‐taking and its relationship to economic mobility based on the information produced by this analysis.
Topics: Upskilling and Reskilling; Education, Employment, and Earnings; Career and Technical Education
Economic Mobility for Adult Learners: Strengthening Short-Term Skills Builder Course Sequences
2023
Kathy Booth, Pamela Fong, Peter Riley Bahr, Jennifer May-Trifiletti, and Yiran Chen
WestEd Center for Economic Mobility
Community colleges are facing significant shifts in population demographics and regional economies that are upending traditional approaches to recruiting and retaining students. The current enrollment crisis highlights a fundamental service delivery issue: college structures are largely designed for firsttime, full-time students. This approach often poses challenges for students balancing work and family responsibilities, particularly in the context of rising inflation, scarce affordable housing, and reduced state funding for education. For many current and potential students, it is not clear that attending college is worth the opportunity costs.
Given the declining number of new high school graduates, many colleges are exploring strategies for attracting more students, including more adult learners. As colleges seek to grow enrollment of adult learners, one segment of the student population on which community colleges should focus their attention is skills builders: students who typically enroll in colleges for a short period of time, take and successfully complete a handful of career-oriented classes, and frequently translate their coursework into earnings gains. This practice guide introduces community college leaders, practitioners, staff, and institutional researchers to skills builders. It is intended to build collective knowledge about skills builders and support college teams as they explore how strengthening skills builder course sequences can be an enrollment and equity strategy at their college.
Topics: Adult Students; Upskilling and Reskilling; Education, Employment, and Earnings; Career and Technical Education
The Labor Market Returns to a Community College Education for Non-Completing Students
2019
Peter Riley Bahr
Journal of Higher Education
https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2018.1486656
Data from California was used in this study to estimate the returns to a community college education that does not result in a postsecondary credential. The study found strong, positive returns to completed credits in career and technical education (CTE) fields that are closely linked to employment sectors that are not credential-intensive (sectors in which employment often does not require a college degree), such as public safety, skilled blue-collar trade and technical work, and accounting and bookkeeping, among others. In these sectors, students were able to convert the human capital acquired in their coursework into returns that far exceeded the cost of the coursework itself, making some noncompleting educational pathways a rational means of securing earnings gains. This finding is consistent with emerging research on skills-builder students and other segments of the community college student population who exhibit coherent patterns of course taking and enrollment that typically do not result in a postsecondary credential. Further investigations of high-return noncompleting pathways are warranted and could help colleges to target efforts to grow postsecondary completion opportunities for students through short-term certificates programs, while also aiding efforts to communicate to stakeholders the successes that cannot be measured by counting credentials or transfers.
An earlier version of this paper is available at http://capseecenter.org/the-labor-market-returns-to-a-community-college-education-for-non-completing-students
Topics: Education, Employment, and Earnings; Career and Technical Education; Upskilling and Reskilling
The Missing Piece: Quantifying Non-Completion Pathways to Success
2013
Kathy Booth and Peter Riley Bahr
WestEd and LearningWorks
Increasingly, community colleges are measuring success by the outcomes their students achieve, in addition to the number of students they serve. The national push for completion of degrees, certificates, and transfer to four-year institutions has helped to focus colleges on measurable goals. However, while completion outcomes are important metrics of success, they do not measure all of the goals of community colleges. There are also significant metrics of success related to workforce development—like gains in earning and job retention—which can occur outside of the completion framework. Examining non-completion pathways and better measuring employment outcomes can help colleges develop stronger programs that reflect the diverse goals of their students.
Community colleges support a variety of job training programs that provide significant benefits to students but do not result in college certificates or degrees, such as apprenticeship programs, courses that prepare students to earn an industry certification or professional license, and contract education programs that enable employees to upgrade their skills in fields such as technology or public safety. In addition, some community college students take only the few courses that they need to secure a new job or advance in an existing one, with no intention of completing a credential or transferring. As more states seek to link funding to student outcomes, colleges need ways to measure and evaluate non-completion successes, just as they have developed methods of measuring completion outcomes. By better understanding the diverse pathways that students are forging to reach their goals, community colleges can find new ways to measure and support students’ success in the workforce.
Topics: Upskilling and Reskilling; Education, Employment, and Earnings; Career and Technical Education
What’s Completion Got To Do With It?: Using Course-Taking Behavior to Understand Community College Success
2012
Peter Riley Bahr and Kathy Booth
Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges
http://www.learningworksca.org/whats-completion-got-to-do-with-it-using-course-taking-behavior-to-understand-community-college-success/
California’s community college system encompasses a broad-ranging vision for higher education. Students are able to access a diversity of programs including an affordable alternative for the first years of a bachelor’s degree, job training, basic skills, life-long learning and social services resources for groups such as returning veterans and welfare recipients. This expansive scope reflects the desire to grow both the economy and human potential. Yet, as resources dwindle, the conversation about what constitutes success has focused on those outcomes that can be counted easily. Statewide efforts, such as the Task Force on Student Success and national initiatives sponsored by the federal government and large foundations, have encouraged the use of completion—defined as the attainment of degrees and certificates or transfer to a four-year institution—as the yardstick for effectiveness.
But does completion capture the full impact of community colleges? And if community colleges desire to demonstrate their effect on students more broadly, what should they be measuring? These questions become particularly important in the current economic climate, as colleges are engaged in the painful process of cutting programs, services and even entire majors. In order to prioritize offerings, colleges must understand how students are using their institutions and how proposed changes will affect various student populations.
A study of course-taking behavior among California community college students, conducted by Dr. Peter Bahr, revealed that nearly a third of first-time students engaged in skills-building behavior—enrolling in a small number of courses over a few years. Although they passed these courses at very high rates, this group did not go on to achieve a degree, certificate or transfer. This is significant because colleges do not have a consistent way to capture the positive impacts of short-term course-taking, and because this large group is regarded as failing when using the completion yardstick.
This inquiry guide applies the findings of Bahr’s study within the context of attaining degrees, certificates, and transfer, and includes discussion questions that can help relate the results to key concerns in community colleges. It is intended to support conversations on college campuses and in the policy arena on: 1) how to better understand students’ goals by examining their course-taking behavior; 2) the types of measures that would help better assess community college impact; 3) how colleges could allocate resources to yield greater student success; and 4) the potential impacts of current reform efforts.
Topics: Upskilling and Reskilling