Victor Rubin

High school career academies and post-secondary outcomes

Abstract This paper focuses on the outcomes associated with one type of school-to-work program, the career academy. By comparing the outcomes from career academy programs with those from more traditional programs, we evaluate their potential for improving the post-secondary experiences over students from more traditional curriculum programs. Using both single-district and national (across-district) databases, we show that the career academy has the potential for increasing education levels to those of students describing themselves as having followed an academic program. However, we show that the career academy may not be equally effective for all students, and other studies have shown that they carry relatively high marginal costs over more traditional programs. Thus, it may be that career academies should be offered as part of an array of high school programs to meet the educational needs of diverse student bodies and cost constraints of administrators.