The Role of Community Colleges in Workforce Development for Low-Skilled Workers Sponsored by the Center for Poverty Research and the UC Davis School of Education
Community colleges are the primary point of access to higher
education for many Americans. These open-access colleges offer
many programs outside the traditional academic track to students
with a diverse set of employment histories, academic preparation,
and demographic characteristics.
Policymakers continue to look to community colleges as critical
institutions for improving workforce shortages and for raising
the skills of the American workforce. However, despite
decades of research on the rising payoffs to schooling and skills
of all types, little is known about the vocational or career
technical pathways of the community college and how such pathways
affect the students and labor markets they serve. What is
the role of the nation’s community colleges in promoting skill
development through vocational education offerings?
The Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis will host an
interdisciplinary gathering of scholars to discuss new work in
this area, focusing on what we can learn from newly available
data on community college programs and outcomes, and what are the
key questions that researchers should tackle next.
Michal Kurlaender’s work focuses on education policy and
evaluation, particularly practices that address existing
racial/ethnic and socioeconomic inequality at various stages of
the educational attainment process.
