Technical Education, Technical Skills, and Economic Mobility Through Careers: Evidence from Skill Credentials

June 2026 - Current

Summary

Funder: Urban Institute's Student Upward Mobility Initiative (SUMI)

YPL is analyzing the Industry Recognized Credentials (IRCs) earned by high school students in Michigan Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs. This project includes 3 major goals:

  1. Develop a classification of credentials and evaluate credential quality across CTE fields of study.
  2. Analyze patterns of credential attainment across student groups and assess fairness, alignment with specific occupations, and relationships with other measures of academic achievement.
  3. Explore relationships between credential attainment and postsecondary education pursuits and career clarity.

The project includes gathering detailed descriptions of the competencies and skills evaluated by each credential and using large language models to map them to tasks in the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). The team is also developing a novel measure of career clarity derived from postsecondary coursetaking records to measure whether students who earn a credential in high school appear to have more clarity and momentum in their early college years.

Ann Arbor students in CTE construction class

    • Have any questions?

    Contact