Certified Skills: Who Earns Industry-Based Certifications in High School, and How Do They Shape Students' Postsecondary Education and Employment Outcomes? Policy Brief

Texas, like many states, considers students to be "college, career, or military ready" if they earn an industry-based certification (IBC) in high school. While the expansion of opportunities for students to earn IBCs has been stimulated through state policy, limited research has systematically examined what factors influence students' receipt of IBCs and the relationship between IBCs and students' postsecondary educational and employment outcomes. The results of this study show that the greatest source of variation in students' receipt of IBCs is across schools, suggesting that school-level approaches to expanding IBCs are particularly critical. IBCs are found to have a positive but modest relationship with students' college enrollment and persistence, nearly no relationship with the likelihood of employment, and large and positive relationships with earnings for many IBC subjects. Importantly, these results are largely consistent across demographic groups, suggesting few inequities in the relationship between IBC receipt and subsequent outcomes. Overall, the results suggest IBCs provide concrete earnings benefits and do not deter students from higher education, but access to IBC opportunities remains highly uneven across the state.