Career oriented and university bound: higher education outcomes of IB Career-related Programme graduates in the US

ABSTRACT

The Career-related Programme (CP) is an innovative education programme by the International Baccalaureate (IB). Designed to promote college and career readiness equally in the last two years of high school, the CP combines rigorous university preparatory coursework with targeted career-related studies. This study examines the patterns of higher education enrolment, destination and persistence of all CP graduates from high schools in the US between 2013 and 2015. The results indicate that CP graduates enrol in higher education at higher rates than do all high school graduates nationally and career and technical education concentrators specifically: 81% versus 68% versus 70%, respectively. They persist for 1 year at higher rates than do all high school graduates: 89% versus 72%, respectively. Results of logistic regression show that the number of IB exams and the completion of the CP certificate are significant predictors of postsecondary enrolment and that higher mean IB exam scores predict higher odds of a student attending a 4-year institution over a 2-year institution. The results suggest that students who engage in career and technical education alongside rigorous university preparatory coursework within the CP are well-prepared to succeed in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• International Baccalaureate
• postsecondary outcomes
• college and career readiness
• higher education
• career technical education
• vocational education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The four programmes offered by the IB are the IB Primary Years Programme (PYP, ages 3–11), IB Middle Years Programme (MYP, ages 11–16), IB Career-related Programme (CP, ages 16–19) and IB Diploma Programme (DP, ages 16–19).

2. The term vocational education is still regularly used in some contexts (notably the UK). However, in the American education system, the term is firmly out of favour and associated with an antiquated system of ‘alternative education, separate from “regular” educational programs, for students who are considered to be not interested in going, or not able to go, to college’ (Withington et al. 2012, 141).

3. The CP was first piloted in 2009, then officially rolled out for all interested schools in 2012. Accordingly, the sample we used consists of some of the first student cohorts to go through the CP.

4. The IB data system also includes demographic data for 88% of CP graduates in our sample; specifically, race/ethnicity, English proficiency status, gender and eligibility for the federal FRL programme (a proxy for low-income status; e.g. Gordon, VanderKamp, and Halic 2015).

5. We had enough information to include these special cases in some calculations, but not others. For that reason, some analyses on the higher education sample were computed for N = 435, and others for N = 439.

6. The October cut-off was chosen to match the operational definition used by the Institute of Educational Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education (e.g. Kena et al. 2016).

7. Actual numbers were not available at the time of report writing.

8. In some cases, classification as ‘designed for transfer’ was possible based on the name of the major in the NSC record, such as ‘general studies’ or ‘AA for transfer’. For the rest, we made the designation by looking up details of the programmes on their institutions’ websites, where descriptions at least indicated that the programme is designed to prepare students for further study at a 4-year HEI. In cases where neither the programme name nor the description specifically mentioned preparation for transfer, we classified the major or programme as terminal.