Yes Virginia — Another Great Data Source

Related Posts: Finding Employer Contacts Finding Employment Data Quick Career Facts

I've had a number of posts lately on data sources, how to find employment projections, state and county labor market profiles, and employer partners. Well, here's another: YesVirginia.org. YesVirginia is powered by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership and is an excellent source of information about market, economic, and demographic information in Virginia.

Although YesVirginia is geared towards business owners in Virginia, don't underestimate its usefulness! A reader recently got in touch to say that she frequently uses this site to power her research for CTE programs and notes that their data is easy to present to both students and faculty. She writes, this is an "an excellent tool that I use all of the time for research. The site breaks down many avenues of business including business sectors and community profiles. I use the community profiles to find business members for our CTE board. Their information is always timely and the statistical data is easy to interpret for students and faculty. Hope this helps."

Too Few College Students Reach Graduation

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Graduation rates at two and four-year colleges around the country are startlingly low, according to a new report by Complete College America. The report, Time is the Enemy, presents an urgent message: There is no time to waste. The authors find overall that students are taking far too much time to complete their degrees, and that too few people who enroll in postsecondary certificate, two-year, and four-year degree programs actually ever make it through to graduation. As more CTE students go on to higher education, it becomes more important for CTE professionals to understand the challenges they will face.

It has been known for a long time that postsecondary graduation rates are low. I wrote about this back in August, in a post that reported graduation rate data from the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia. However, Time is the Enemy brings something new to the conversation because it looks at all college students. According to the report, previously available data on this subject included only first-time, full-time college students because this is all that the federal government requires public colleges to report: "The federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) doesn’t count what happens to part-time students, who make up about 40 percent of all students, nor does it count the success of transfer, low-income, or remedial students" (page 7). In order to give better, more detailed, information on graduation rates, Complete College America recruited 33 states, including Virginia, to submit detailed data on all of the students enrolling in public two- and four-year colleges.

Why Invest in CTE and STEM in High School?

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Workers at all levels of education are needed to fill the gaps in the demand for STEM competencies. What's missing in our drive to raise STEM competencies, according to a new report "STEM" from the Center on Education and Workforce (CEW) at Georgetown University, is a clear pathway between high school STEM courses and careers and higher education in STEM fields. This is true for all students, but particularly for those students who are heading to community colleges or right to work after high school. The report argues that expanding and improving career and technical education STEM programs in high school is essential in order to deal with what the authors predict is an "impending shortage of STEM competencies."

Planning a New CTE Program? Here's how to find employment data for your program application

Related Posts: Employers Help Open A New Program Keeping Employer Partners

CTE is an employment driven program. Ideally, students' academic studies and CTE courses work hand in hand to prepare them for adult life: academic courses provide a broad educational background and CTE courses prepare students with targeted career and workplace readiness skills. To remain employment-driven, it's important to keep in close contact with local employers and to mine their knowledge of the skills that students need and the jobs that will be available.

Keeping in touch with employment trends is particularly important when planning new programs.  CTE aims to provide students with course options that will open job opportunities, not just courses that will attract their interest. Gauging student interest is important, of course, and a required step in the planning process, but most students know very little about labor market trends. They often underestimate the value of STEM skills, for example, and overestimate the potential for a career in the arts.

How to Find Employers in Your Community

Related Posts Keeping Employer Partners Sustaining Employer Partnerships Business Involvement in Education Employers Help Open a New Program The Employment Picture in Your Division

How do you get started building partnerships with local employers? Reaching out to employers is next to impossible if you don't know where to find them, but you can get help from two valuable websites that show:

• the 50 largest employers in each of Virginia's counties, cities, and regions;
• a name and contact information for local employers of hundreds of different specific occupations.

Hispanics and African Americans Underrepresented in STEM

Six percent of STEM
workers are
African American.

We already know that STEM jobs are important for U.S. workforce competitiveness and that more STEM workers are needed to fill market demands for STEM jobs.  A particular concern in the movement to increase interest in STEM, however, is to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of those working in STEM jobs.

In order to increase STEM diversity, we need to improve minority college graduation rates. According to a new U.S. Department of Commerce report, low graduation rates for African Americans and Hispanics play the largest role in limiting their employment opportunities in STEM fields. Currently only 14% of Hispanics and 22% of African Americans have a bachelor's or higher degree, compared to 35% of whites and 54% of Asians.