Transition: College to Career

This report discusses the outcomes of a longitudinal study, conducted to investigate the profile of low-skill adults entering community or technical colleges in Washington State and to identify the points at which this demographic commonly drops out or fails to achieve. The study findings indicate that technical and community colleges should establish goals for low-skill adults to earn a credential and take a year’s worth of college-level courses to improve opportunities for achievement via college entry or career-path employment.

This report explores how institutions of higher education are borrowing from business and government “shared service” models to control costs and deliver higher operational efficiency. The report examines the key differences between postsecondary institutions and the private-sector companies that use a shared service model and details the principles behind the model. 

This study explores graduates of a baccalaureate-level program in Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) Engineering Technology, and aims to determine the experience of graduates after they completed their degrees and began work in the field for which they were trained. The authors surveyed on-campus and on-line graduates, and their low response rate resulted in a non-representative sample. The authors found that graduates felt the program was useful in their employment, and that they had positive perceptions of the faculty and curriculum.

This report examined the economic benefits of attaining an Associates Degree. The authors analyzed data from 579 community colleges and data gathered by Payscale.com on the earning estimates of graduates from the community colleges in the study. The authors found Associates Degree completers had a median net gain during a 40-year work-life of more than $259,000 compared with that of a high school graduate in the state where the community college is located. However, there is a wide variation in the net gain among states.

This report provides projections of job demand as well as skill and educational requirements through the year 2018 for jobs that fall into each of the 16 technical education and career clusters. The report also includes wage data to help identify high-wage clusters and occupations.

This study compared post-secondary education faculty to student beliefs regarding competencies for post-education employment. Faculty members and international and U.S. students were given quantitative surveys where they were asked to rank-order a list of 17 business skills in order of importance. The authors found students enrolled in business curricula had differing beliefs regarding competencies needed for post-education employment than those held by business faculty. Additionally, business faculty beliefs regarding exit competencies differ from those of surveyed employers.