Vocational education is male-friendly learning

A big new study confirms that technical education boosts outcomes - for men

Maybe you were too knee-deep in Halloween candy to notice MDRC’s new evaluation study of New York’s P-TECH high schools. But it is a pretty big deal to those of us who care about:

• programmatic interventions

• high-quality evaluation studies

• vocational and technical education; and

• the educational challenges of struggles of boys and men.

TL;DR: technical schools help men.

The P-TECH programs cover grades 9-14, explicitly integrating secondary and post-secondary education. They thus aim in part at bridging the gap between high school and post-secondary learning (a transition that leaves where so many students struggle) with a particular focus on vocational training. Students are enrolled in both high school and college, take CTE classes and are encouraged to take college credits while in high school. By design, they are built on strong partnerships between a high school, a community college and an employer.

P-TECH, Pro-Male

The MDRC study is of the first seven P-TECH 9-14 programs in New York City, and is able to make use of New York’s lottery system for admissions to infer some persuasive causal evidence of impact. The bottom line is that P-TECH works very well for young men, especially in terms of getting a post-secondary qualification.

Most strikingly, men in P-TECH programs were much more likely to have an associates’s degree within seven years of entering high school (13% versus 3% of the comparison group):

There were similar trends in terms of enrollment in four year colleges, too. Among the P-TECH men, 39 percent of male students in the were enrolled in a four-year college, compared with 26 percent of the comparison group. But on all these measures there was no equivalent boost for young women. As the MDRC team notes:

This difference in impacts suggests that the P-TECH 9-14 model seems to have provided an additional level of support for young men that they did not experience in other kinds of high schools, allowing them to succeed at similar rates to young women.

This finding is particularly notable because it suggests that the P-TECH 9-14 model may be helping young men buck national trends in college enrollment and degree attainment that have seen this population achieve less in these areas than young women. . . At the same time, these findings add to a body of literature that have found CTE engagement can have positive impacts for young men, including an MDRC evaluation of Career Academies, some recent studies of regional vocational technical high schools in Connecticut, and an early evaluation of a high school internship program.

There are extra costs associated with P-TECH, and it’s too early to tell whether on a pretty narrow ROI basis what the overall cost-benefit looks like, so this is something to watch. To their credit, the MDRC carefully capture these costs:

But at least for the men in the study, it seems highly likely that these improvements in educational outcomes will generate better long-run outcomes in terms of earnings and employment.

VocEd is good for boys and men, and that’s good

The new MDRC study echoes the findings of other studies, showing that vocational forms of learning—technical high schools, career academies, apprenticeships—show much more positive results for men than for women. (I summarize this evidence in Of Boys and Men). Here’s a chunk of that chapter:

High school curricula need more “hands-on” elements. This does not mean sending all the boys into shop class to learn a trade while the girls polish their college application essays. But it does mean incorporating more practical and more vocational elements (i.e., CTE) into the general curriculum, and especially creating more stand-alone technical schools. The broader goal here is more of what philosopher Joseph Fishkin calls “opportunity pluralism.” Rather than a single narrow path in what he calls a “unitary opportunity structure,” there should be many different routes to success.

How much can CTE help boys in particular? The evidence base here is not very broad, but what there is looks encouraging. A few high-quality studies stand out. The first examined the impact of career academies, which are small, vocationally oriented high schools. There are an estimated 7,000 of these academies across the nation, although they vary greatly in their approach. The evaluation study by MDRC looked at nine academies in New York. On traditional education metrics, such as grades, test scores, and college entry, they were a failure. But male students from these schools, mostly Hispanic and Black, saw a 17% earnings boost, equivalent to an extra $30,000, over the eight years of the follow-up study. This wage bump is similar to the one for students completing two years of community college. Strikingly, for young women graduating from the academies, there was no apparent benefit on any measured outcome, an exception to the rule of educational interventions overall that I described in chapter 6—and further evidence that CTE is a particularly male-friendly educational approach.

A second study examined the impact of a statewide system of sixteen CTE schools in Connecticut, which collectively educate around 11,000 students, 7% of those in the school system. Male students at these schools had a graduation rate 10 percentage points higher than in traditional schools, and their wages were 33–35% higher by the age of 23. Again, there were no apparent gains for female students. These U.S. studies echo similar findings from a study in Norway, where a new vocational track in high school boosted earnings for male participants. As the authors Marianne Bertrand, Magne Mogstad, and Jack Mountjoy write:

Considerations related to differential benefits by gender should be an integral part of the policy conversation surrounding vocational education.

They should be, but they’re not. The strongest advocates for vocational investments are shy of the gender differences in impact, largely because they are worried that highlighting the pro-male tilt will reduce political support. In a zero-sum, blinkered, fact-averse political world, I get that. But it’s time to be a bit braver. Given the huge gender gaps in mainstream academic education, this should be seen as a feature, rather than a bug.

Our national underinvestment in, and undervaluation of, vocational learning is bad, period. But it is especially bad news for boys and men. (Look out for longer post shortly about apprenticeship from me and Will Secker).

The good news is that the P-TECH 9-14 approach is already being more widely adopted. New York is opening more schools, and there are now around 200 such schools across 13 states, according to the MDRC report. This is great news for boys and men.

We should be investing more in vocational and technical education and training not despite the fact that it particularly helps men, but because it does.