How do some high school students in the U.S. prepare for work and get a full-time job after graduation? This study attempts to answer this question and will show that high school students do take up full-time employment directly after graduation, and that some take up employment that is related to their curricular experience. Why this is the case is driven by different factors that combine a predilection towards employment and career, a curricular pathway, a program design that has work and employment as an end goal, and a policy framework that still tilts towards employment.
Career Maturity and Participating in CTE as Preparation for Work
During their high school experience, one of the most important decisions students will make is about their careers (Patton & Creed, 2001). Whether students are ready to make informed decisions about occupational choices is the focus of the theory of Career Maturity (Savickas & Porfeli, 2011). Career maturity (CM) is “an important aspect of an individual’s career development” and explains how “an individual with more career maturity is one who has both self-awareness and career awareness” (Lau, Chung, & Wang, 2021). A significant aspect of CM is that the ability of students to make career decisions evolves with age (Patton & Creed, 2001) and is a process (Crites, 1973). It is influenced “by household income, academic achievement, and parental involvement” (Lau et al., 2021, p. 312), socioeconomic status, “ability, past achievement, aspirations, work experience, and schooling” (Fletcher, 2012, p. 107).
Although CM has been challenged from the perspective of age and gender (Patton & Creed, 2001), culture (Watson, 2019), cultural and economic context (Vondracek & Reitzle, 1998), locus of control, and race and ethnicity (Naidoo, 1998), it nevertheless provides a frame of reference to understand the decisions students make to build a set of knowledge and skills that they can use in their postsecondary work experience or education trajectories.
The idea of CM as “the readiness of an individual to make an informed, age-appropriate career decision and cope with appropriate career development tasks” (Levinson et al., 1998, p. 475) explains how students think about employment as an option. The mechanism they use is taking credits in occupational programs, particularly those programs that can lead them to working in the same field. In that sense, LaForest (2023) argued that “learning particular labor market skills while attending high school may improve their ability to find well-paying jobs after graduation” (p. 39). Those students will shape those skills further by also participating in supportive curriculum strategies like work-based learning programs (Esters & Retallick, 2013). However, the decisions students make about their careers under the Career Maturity theory need to be placed in the context of the school model of CTE delivery and the limits and options it poses. Students participating in CTE in a comprehensive high school, the prevalent model in the country that includes more students, will have more limited options in terms of courses and programs than those attending a school with a CTE-dedicated model of delivery, like area technical centers, technical high schools, and career academies. Those differences, or “schooling experience,” critically set boundaries for students' decisions.