Vocational Education in the United States: The Early 1990s.

With passage of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) of 1994, national attention has turned to the systems in place in this country for educating and training people for work. Historically, vocational education has made up the major share of such efforts. This publication provides educators, policymakers, and researchers with the most current data on the vocational education enterprise and some data that are available on other school-to-work activities. This report, which was produced about three years after the publication of 'Vocational education in the United States: 1969-1990' (indexed at TD/IRD 88.02), extends the available vocational education data up to 1992, and provides some trend information on the decade spanning 1982-1992. It also provides information on public high school graduates and teachers and on nonbaccalaureate students (those pursuing less than a bachelor's degree) in a variety of postsecondary institutions. Additionally, this report covers a number of key issues including the integration of academic and vocational education, the access of special populations to quality programs, and the access of individuals to programs nontraditional for their sex. Finally, this report provides information on most of the targeted equity populations: women; Indigenous people; people with a disability; people of non-English speaking background; economically disadvantaged people (both urban and rural); single parents; and incarcerated people. Finally, the report concludes that vocational education encompasses diverse objectives, activities, providers, and participants. No single description of the vocational education experience covers all situations. Experiences vary among education levels, types of schools and institutions, vocational program areas, and groups of students and teachers. The report presents a wide array of data that shed light on these different experiences and help to understand the complex nature of the US vocational education system in the early 1990s.