Who takes high-earning CTE pathways?
High school students in Career and Technical Education (CTE) select concentration areas that map to almost every occupation in the modern U.S. economy. Some fields have much higher potential earnings than others. Celeste K. Carruthers, Shaun Dougherty, Thomas Goldring, Daniel Kreisman, Roddy Theobald, Carly Urban, and Jesús Villero study CTE enrollment patterns across four states and one large metro area to assess if potential pay arising from students’ CTE fields foreshadows longstanding inequities in the labor market. We find that women concentrate in fields linked to jobs with 7–20% lower pay, a range that includes the actual U.S. gender pay gap. We also find evidence of disparities in potential pay by race, ethnicity, family income, and disability identification, although these are much smaller and less consistent across locations than the gender gap.
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