Preparing for the Workplace Charting A Course for Federal Postsecondary Training Policy (1994) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
3 DIAGNOSING THE HEALTH OF POSTSECONDARY TRAINING
3 DIAGNOSING THE HEALTH OF POSTSECONDARY TRAINING
Pages 64-102
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 64... ...
We will therefore evaluate the postsecondary training institutions and programs by organizing our discussion around five questions relating to the characteristics of a well-functioning system: Is training accessible, and do people have the information they need to select among training options? What do we know about the results of different kinds of training and what works for which people?
|
From page 65... ...
Thanks to the wide availability of state-subsidized community colleges and vocational-technical schools with few or no admission requirements and to financial aid to help cover the costs of unsubsidized training programs in private and proprietary schools, there is generally good access to postsecondary qualifying training. Two recent studies, which approach the issue in very different ways, confirm the general accessibility of postsecondary qualifying training.
|
From page 66... ...
Nevertheless, there are some state-to-state differences even in access to training-oriented institutions: not every state has an extensive community college or technical college system, and the willingness and ability of states to subsidize these institutions varies. In general, however, qualifying training is quite accessible for most people, even the economically disadvantaged.
|
From page 67... ...
The current failure of many employers to provide much formal training to their employees, especially younger and less-educated ones, casts doubt on their interest and ability to serve as major providers of qualifying training. The quality of work-based learning can vary from excellent to awful, depending on the training skills and expertise of those doing the training.
|
From page 68... ...
Women, minorities, young people, employees of smaller firms, lower-level workers, and workers with lower levels of formal education tend to receive disproportionately low amounts of skills improvement training (Kochan and Osterman, 1991:26-27; Lynch, 1992~. Many firms, especially small and new companies, appear reluctant to invest in training for a variety of reasons (Stern and Ritzen, 1991; Lynch, 1994; National Research Council, 1993~.
|
From page 69... ...
Access to Retraining Access to the two major federal dislocated worker retraining programs is currently limited, primarily by the need for dislocated workers to meet specific eligibility criteria and the size of appropriations to finance the training. The ability of individuals to participate in the programs may also be limited by amount of income support available and the timeliness of .
|
From page 70... ...
Lack of income may also inhibit dislocated workers from using job training assistance. TAA provides income support to eligible dislocated workers for 52 weeks after exhausting unemployment insurance.
|
From page 71... ...
Sandell and Rupp (1988:34-36) used these criteria and data from the Job Training Quarterly Survey for program years 1984 and 1985 along with information from the Current Population Survey to estimate JTPA participation rates.
|
From page 72... ...
Chapter 2 showed that fewer than 4 million people annually have been served by the programs authorized by the Adult Education Act. In the National Literacy Act, Congress said that public and private literacy programs taken together serve approximately 19 percent of those in need of help.
|
From page 73... ...
The necessary record-keeping is often not done by training providers. Where public funds are not involved (as in firm-based skills improvement training)
|
From page 74... ...
Where they exist, we rely on random assignment experiments as the best indicator of program effectiveness.7 But it is not always possible to do a random assignment experiment. For instance, it is impossible to forbid some students from going to community colleges.
|
From page 75... ...
These cases come close to a random assignment, controlled experiment in that the people who have had training are unlikely to differ in major ways from those who have not. For instance, when one state increases the age at which students can legally leave school and another does not, the students have relatively little choice.
|
From page 76... ...
To answer these questions, researchers have had to rely primarily on cross-sectional surveys of income or longitudinal sets of data that have followed three high school graduating classes for a number of years.8 The cross-sectional data provide evidence for the population as a whole, but existing high school longitudinal studies inadequately reflect the results of training for the large number of older students who enroll in community colleges and proprietary schools. The available data indicate that large fractions of students who enroll in community colleges and proprietary schools fail to acquire any credentials either associate degrees or certificates-and that many of these stu
|
From page 77... ...
The fraction is substantially lower, between 11 and 17 percent, for those leaving community colleges without a credential, and somewhat lower for students leaving technical institutes and private vocational schools without credentials (Grubb, 1989~. Other results based on the same methodology suggest that the fraction having related employment at age 32 is higher about 76 percent for males and 67 percent for females for those earning certificates than it is for those earning associate degrees, among whom approximately 22 percent of men and 45 percent of women were in related employment.
|
From page 78... ...
Therefore, these findings on the relatedness of training must be considered extremely preliminary. Researchers have attempted to estimate whether training at community colleges and proprietary schools raises the earnings of those who attend.
|
From page 79... ...
Men completing training at proprietary schools had higher earnings than high school graduates and the same as community college students, but that advantage was due to other characteristics and not to the fact of attending those schools. Among women, the employment rate
|
From page 80... ...
Several methodological decisions made by Kane and Rouse deflate the value of credentials compared to coursework, but the difference between the two analyses remains puzzling. Given the large numbers of individuals in community colleges, technical institutes, and proprietary schools who do not acquire credentials and who leave with very small amounts of coursework completed, the lack of convincing evidence supporting the benefits of small amounts of postsecondary education is troubling.
|
From page 81... ...
Most of what is known about the results of skills improvement training, therefore, comes from analyses of national databases, such as the Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Employment Opportunities Pilot Projects Survey, the National Longitudinal Study of the high school class of 1972, and various cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience. Studies using these sources focus on economic returns to individuals and indicate that company-based training has an impact on earnings "in the range of 10 to 30 percent [that]
|
From page 82... ...
Lynch, for example, does find some evidence of selection bias for those in her sample of people who have had some on-the-job training. Other potential evidence is available on the effectiveness of skills improvement training: virtually every state supports a program to fund shortterm, firm-based training, and much of the training that goes on in such programs involves existing workers in skills enhancement.
|
From page 83... ...
The evaluation tracked trade readjustment allowance recipients (some of whom received training as well as allowances under TAA) for 12 quarters following their initial unemployment insurance claim.
|
From page 84... ...
It also makes findings on the results of JTPA and JOBS not comparable to our earlier findings on results of vocational training in community colleges and proprietary schools. There are other reasons as well as to why findings on JTPA and JOBS cannot be compared to those on training at these postsecondary schools: most importantly, the personal characteristics of those receiving training are likely to be quite different, with JTPA and
|
From page 85... ...
While more intensive programs showed some tendency to result in larger earnings gains, the added costs led to a lower impact per dollar spent (Friedlander and Gueron, 19921. Because of the difficulty of designing experiments to assess the differential impact of different services, relatively little is known about just what aspects of various programs contributed most to the positive results achieved.
|
From page 86... ...
The study suggests that close linkages between occupational training and specific employers may be an important key to sustained training results. For the purposes of the committee's deliberations, a crucial aspect of existing welfare-to-work evaluations is the limited information they provide about the kind of education and training now being encouraged by the JOBS program.
|
From page 87... ...
, indicate that overall the program has had modest positive impacts on the earnings of adults, but zero or even negative effects on the earnings of youths. The evaluation divided program participants into three groups on the basis of service recommendations at program intake: those recommended for classroom training in occupational skills; those recommended for on-the-job training; and those recommended for other, less intensive services (e.g., job-search assistance, work experience, basic education)
|
From page 88... ...
The Supported Work Study found negligible program impacts on the earnings of participants, most of whom were males. Preliminary results from JOBSTART showed negligible short-term impacts for female youths and large short-term negative impacts for male youths over the 2-year follow-up period, as in the National JTPA Study.
|
From page 89... ...
Forthcoming studies include large-scale studies of JOBS programs in a number of sites, studies of second-chance education and training programs for teenage mothers on welfare, further results from the JTPA evaluation, and studies of programs for noncustodial parents of children on welfare. An important area where little is known about outcomes and impacts is remediation: basic education and literacy programs for post-high-school individuals with severe educational handicaps.
|
From page 90... ...
INCENTIVES, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND QUALITY Incentives and accountability mechanisms in postsecondary training have often been criticized as focusing on inputs rather than outcomes or value added; therefore, it is said, they do little to encourage strong performance and quality training. The absence of effective mechanisms to ensure quality has left at least one major federal program, student financial aid, open to significant problems of fraud and abuse.
|
From page 91... ...
A study by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (1991:xi) found that all states exercised oversight of proprietary schools through licensing or approval mechanisms but confirmed the "growing belief that many states do not have adequate laws and regulations to protect students and the taxpayers who have invested their money in those students." The study recommended strengthening state licensing provisions and proposed that state licensing be given a more central role in the determination of institutional eligibility for federal student aid.
|
From page 92... ...
In fact, performance management is not oriented to
|
From page 93... ...
The evidence is mixed as to how much employers consider postsecondary training when they make hiring decisions. The generally positive economic returns to qualifying training, at least for those who get degrees or certificates, suggest that employers do place value on what schools teach.
|
From page 94... ...
They can provide work-based training and instructors for school-based training; make state-of-the-art equipment available to students; contribute to training curricula and pedagogy by helping educators understand industry and occupational skill demands; serve on advisory and governing boards (including boards of directors at large proprietary schools with corporate structures) ; and exert quality control over training by helping to define industry skill standards and rewarding skill certificates in their hiring processes.
|
From page 95... ...
Members of the committee observed the same process in use in community colleges in South Carolina. We should note that employer contributions to school-based training curricula need to be viewed cautiously.
|
From page 96... ...
These include cost-shifting, where programs with limited funding (especially JTPA and welfare programs) refer clients and thereby shift costs to community colleges and adult schools with enrollment-based, open-ended funding or student aid funds; the general dislike of competition and a pervasive feeling that cooperation will increase total resources; the search by most programs for distinct niches where they need not compete with others; and local brokers including
|
From page 97... ...
Institutions and programs also specialize in the individuals they serve: community colleges and technical institutes serve those students not attending 4-year colleges, as well as those in search of retraining, and experimenters trying to decide about their futures (Manski, 1989~; JTPA serves a group with less formal education and labor-market experience; JOBS provides certain services for welfare clients; and adult education serves those in need of basic l
|
From page 98... ...
Despite the large amount of coordination and referral that in fact occurs at the local level, there is also reason to be concerned about the near absence of mechanisms following individuals through the postsecondary education and training system, helping them make transitions among programs, providing them assistance if they falter, providing them information about the alternatives available, or helping them gain portable credentials that demonstrate competencies valued by employers. As a result, referral among programs-e.g., from JTPA to adult education, or from JOBS to the local community college is likely to result in individuals becoming lost.
|
From page 99... ...
A spate of recent developments suggests that a number of states are moving aggressively to weave the fragments of their own and federal training programs into integrated work force development systems. Governors and business leaders closely involved with such endeavors recognize the importance of decentralizing decision making to the substate level so that solutions can be tailored to the needs of employers and individuals within local labor markets.
|
From page 100... ...
Most of the public funding for training institutions is theirs or flows through them. They are in a far better position than the federal government to oversee the development of arrangements that will result in systematically available training opportunities that are attuned to the specific and varying needs of local labor markets.
|
From page 101... ...
data on school-based training apparently are based on secondary-level vocational education and exclude training received in postsecondary schools such as community colleges and proprietary institutions.
|
From page 102... ...
14. However, the discouraging effects of performance standards are clearly much weaker than often claimed, since the most common form of cooperation between vocational education and JTPA involves JTPA subcontracts with community colleges and technical institutes.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.