Peter Riley Bahr’s research team and colleagues featured in ECMC Foundation "Grantee Spotlight"

A two-year grant from the ECMC Foundation has funded a collaboration between CSHPE Associate Professor Peter Riley Bahr’s research team, WestEd, and The National Center for Inquiry to conduct research identifying and investigating pathways for skills builders in Colorado and Ohio.

In a “Grantee Spotlight” published by the foundation, “skills builders” are identified as students who typically don’t intend to complete a college degree or certificate, but instead hope that a handful of career and technical education (CTE) courses will help them adopt a more stable career pathway and net higher wages. Unfortunately, this hope doesn’t always pan out.

The goal of the team’s research is to help academic institutions identify students who are skill builders; develop course offerings that are well aligned with the regional labor market, offer a stable living wage, and lead to opportunities to earn in-demand academic credentials in future years; and tailor student advising to address equity gaps.

“We also want to provide empirical information to help people understand the role of skills-building in economic mobility, including who benefits and how it relates to earning a living wage,” says Bahr.

Even as their work continues, the team is able to share early outcomes and recommendations, which include: reviewing workforce outcomes; pinpointing beneficial course sequences; introducing a better understanding of outcomes to colleges; development of a sophisticated analytical foundation from which to answer critical and highly time-sensitive policy questions.

“Five years from now,” says Bahr, “I hope that we will have helped people move beyond the rhetoric that you don’t need a degree to clarifying for learners where those short-term pathways to living-wage work are and what the working conditions of those jobs are like.”