The National Center for Education Statistics recently released a new fact sheet in its “Data Point” series on the patterns of CTE coursetaking among students from different locales, including cities, suburbs, towns and rural areas. Titled “Career and Technical Education Coursetaking in 2013, by Locale,” the fact sheet draws data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, which includes students who graduated high school in 2013.
Previously released data shows that for 2013 graduates, of the 26.7 overall credits they earned, 2.6 of those credits were from CTE courses. This fact sheet breaks that data down further by the location of the students’ high schools. The new data show that It students in rural areas and towns earned more CTE credits than students in suburbs and cities, and fewer academic credits.
In addition, —the research shows that a higher percentage of CTE graduates were concentrators (using a new 2-credit definition to correspond as closely as possible to the requirement in Perkins 5) in rural areas (43%) and towns (45%) rather than suburban areas (34%) or cities (35%). Following this pattern, credit earners in rural areas and towns tended to be more concentrated in the CTE subject fields of agriculture and natural resources and construction. Students from towns earned more engineering, design and production credits than those in cities and suburbs; and students from towns, rural areas and cities earned more credits in healthcare than those from suburban areas. The other six CTE areas did not have any clear patterns in differences in credits earned among the locales.
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