Implementation and Impacts of Career-Focused Advising

Recent policies have expanded the availability of career-focused advising in high schools, including for students pursuing career and technical education (CTE) courses of study who might not have been adequately served by traditional college-focused advising. However, there is limited research on the effects of these policies. This study examines the implementation and impacts of career-focused advising in the context of North Carolina’s career coaching program, which places community college staff on select high school campuses to provide guidance around career pathways and high school coursetaking that can prepare students for those pathways. Using descriptive analysis and interviews, we found that the program connected students with information about career opportunities as well as about the state’s dual enrollment program, which can help students to get a jumpstart on earning a credential while still in high school. We used two quasiexperimental methods to analyze the impacts of the program. Our school-level event study analysis found that a school receiving a career coach increased the rate of participation in the dual enrollment program, on average, and may result in an increase in students intending to directly enter the workforce after high school and a decrease in four-year college enrollment. Our student-level propensity score-weighting analysis found that students who met with the career coaches took slightly more CTE dual enrollment courses in high school and were more likely to enroll at two-year colleges after high school than similar students who did not meet with a coach.