(2017-08-01) Feldstein Alternative Pathways How To Rethink Vocational Education

Michael Feldstein: “Alternative Pathways:” How to Rethink Vocational Education (VoTech, Alternatives To A College Degree)

I will use the term “low-income adults”... There are approximately 7 million people who fit that definition in the state of California, “which accounts for nearly 37% of the state’s entire workforce,”

How many of those people are touched by various educational programs?

That grey space represents all the low-income adults in California who are receiving…nothing. But it’s actually worse than that in several ways

Particularly for low-income adults, going to school, incurring debt, and not getting a degree is worse than nothing.

So we have a severe problem of scaling access

The idea that Tyton’s report explores, which is not positioned as an alternative to existing programs but rather another tool in the toolbox, is what they call APP:

An Alternative Pathways Program (APP)

• Focuses on education and training for specific job and career pathways
• Does not offer a traditional postsecondary degree or certificate

Obviously, this is not the only set of goals one could have for post-secondary education.

Tyton asks two basic questions. First, to what degree might APPs—many of which do not currently serve low-income adults—be recruited to fill in some of that grey space? And second, what are the characteristics of an APP that would make it most likely to achieve this goal?

Tyton spends the bulk of their report on the second question by analyzing patterns across over 125 existing APPs.

This brings up a second data fidelity problem, since one does not necessarily have to complete a degree in order to gain economic benefit from coursework

Much of Tyton’s analysis rests on what they call the “six pillars” of alternative pathways programs

In and of themselves, there’s nothing earth-shaking about these categories. But stating them explicitly as part of the analytic framework enables us to do all kinds of additional important work

First, it enables us to ask, “Is this a complete and plausible list of critical success factors for a vocational program

second advantage of having such a framework, which is that it points to a research agenda.

Tyton has proposed a set of preliminary hypotheses for the optimal way to address each pillar based on the research that they conducted

The point of the hypothesis is to have a truth proposition that can be tested

The framework also enables program designers to think about trade-offs more clearly

This example illustrates the point that we should interpret the word “optimal” loosely here

This brings us to one of the most deeply divisive terms in education: scale.

The Tyton report examines two types of scale: inputs and outputs. Access and outcomes

scaling access is not inherently good.

If a chosen strategy for a pillar has a downward-pointing red arrow, then it presents a challenge to scaling access. On-site support to students is harder to provide to many students than providing students with no support

Taken together, the elements of Tyton’s framework give program designers and policy makers both a set of knobs they can turn in an effort to tune a particular program to the needs of a particular student population

Of course, having knobs to twiddle is good, but being able to measure the impact of your knob twiddling is critical

Nowhere does this framework explicitly address ed tech as such.

Absent of a richer analytic framework, these efforts are more likely to fail and less likely to be reproducible because they don’t start with either a holistic understanding of the needs of the students the efforts are trying to help or a clear understanding of how various aspects of the support ecosystem interact with each other.