Agenda, Scope, and Goals

In response to the increasing demand for skilled workers to fill the available and emerging jobs in the commonwealth, in 2016 Virginia established the New Economy Workforce Credentials Grant Program (WCG). The purpose of the program is to create and sustain a supply of credentialed workers for high-demand occupations in the state. The WCG, implemented as the Virginia “FastForward Program,” provides a pay-for-performance model for funding noncredit workforce training that leads to a credential in a high-demand field. In this model, costs are shared among the state, students, and the training institution, where the specific amounts of funding are based on student performance. One important implication of the WCG program is that the state receives data on who completes programs and on who receives credentials, data typically unavailable in other states. 

Most of the noncredit CTE programs consist of only one course that runs between 6 and 12 weeks and has a mix of lectures and hands-on skill demonstrations. According to a recent report by the state, these programs tend to serve a working adult population with an average age of 36, two-thirds of whom have dependents. Descriptive statistics suggest that the majority of noncredit CTE graduates experience a 25 percent to 50 percent wage gain after attaining their credentials. Although hundreds of CTE programs have been offered, nearly three-quarters of the enrollments were from 10 programs concentrating in five occupational fields: health care (four programs), welding and manufacturing (two programs), logistics and transportation (two programs), information technology (one program), and skilled trades (one program). These programs accounted for 73 percent and 75 percent of the total enrollment in the noncredit CTE programs in 2019 and 2020, respectively. All these programs are offered by multiple colleges in the Virginia Community College System (VCCS). The awarded credentials appear to address but not exceed an annual need, implying that there is room for further growth in enrollment in these noncredit CTE programs.  

The VCCS Noncredit CTE Study will address the following research questions:

• What are the academic and labor market outcomes of students enrolled in noncredit CTE programs?
• How are these programs typically designed and delivered?
• Which program factors influence student success?
• Did students who enrolled in noncredit CTE programs intend to continue on a longer-term pathway after obtaining the initial credential? Did they intend to transfer from a noncredit program to a credit-bearing, academic program?
• What did students do after they completed their first credentials? Are they working in the kinds of jobs they expected to be working in? Have any students returned to take more training or classes?
• What kinds of support would students need to continue their education or training?

Design, Sites, and Data Sources

The Noncredit CTE Study will be conducted in the Virginia Community College System, which includes 23 institutions across the state. The system comprises a mix of large and small schools, with institutions located in rural, suburban, and urban settings. Compared with the national average of students enrolled in two-year colleges, VCCS students are more likely to come from rural and low-income backgrounds and are more likely to be Black.

Together with partners at the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine), and building on a long-standing partnership UC Irvine has with VCCS, the study team will draw on a data set that links detailed CTE program data with longitudinal student education data and quarterly earnings data—along with qualitative data collected through interviews with staff members and focus groups with students—to identify institutional and program factors that promote the academic and labor market success of students enrolled in noncredit CTE programs.

Using a combination of VCCS administrative data, National Student Clearinghouse data, unemployment insurance wage records, an administrator survey, staff and partner interviews, student focus groups, and classroom observations, the study will use descriptive and quasi-experimental analyses to delineate core evidence about noncredit CTE programs, including their impacts on students' academic and labor market outcomes, the varying approaches used by programs to design and deliver training, and student and staff experiences in these programs.