What We Know About the Impact of Career and Technical Education: A Systematic Review of the Research

28 secondary-level CTE causal studies, screened from 10,048 records (280 eligible, 38 meeting WWC 4.1 standards, 7 without reservations)

US secondary CTE over roughly the past twenty years; programme types are exposure to CTE courses (10 studies), small learning communities and career academies (8), whole-school CTE models (5), other (5).

Screened with What Works Clearinghouse version 4.1 standards by certified reviewers, then meta-analysed with Hedges g. Two limits sharply bound it, and the authors state both. First, it is a meta of MIXED designs — regression discontinuities and propensity-score matching studies sit in the same pool, and the archive's rule is that a meta inherits its inputs' confounding. Second, and decisively, several influential studies showing earnings impacts are NOT included because the study reports lacked the information needed to compute effect sizes — meaning the earnings row excludes the Connecticut and Career Academies results. The earnings null is therefore not a refutation of those studies; it is a demonstration that the computable evidence base is nearly empty. Dougherty is an author of this review and of two of the primary studies it grades.

Overall CTE effect across all outcomes g = 0.132 (significant). Significant positives: high-school completion 0.137, academic achievement 0.093, employability skills 0.118, college readiness 0.077, enrolment in a two-year college 0.142, employment 0.182. Non-significant: discipline 0.048, attendance -0.048, overall college enrolment 0.031, enrolment in a FOUR-year college -0.037, degree attainment 0.020, and EARNINGS 0.164 on only two studies. By programme type the whole-school CTE model is significant only on high-school completion (0.063). No causal studies exist on CTE's effect on academic achievement in college, and fewer than five exist on discipline, attendance, degree attainment or earnings.

Medium. The pool mixes cutoff and lottery designs with propensity-score matching studies, and the matched studies compare students who chose CTE with students who did not.

The only WWC-standards synthesis of US secondary CTE, so there is nothing to replicate it against. Its independence is compromised in a specific way worth recording: the field's evidence synthesis is not independent of the field's evidence.