Absence of conflict of interest.
Citation
Burgin, X. D., Akrom, A., Qin, H., Ball, A., & Pontarelli, J. (2016). Waubonsee Community College Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant final report. DeKalb, IL: The Office of Research, Evaluation, and Policy Studies, Northern Illinois University.
Highlights
- The study’s objective was to examine the impact of Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant-enhanced Waubonsee Community College (WCC) programs on student education and earnings outcomes.
- The study used a nonexperimental design to compare education and earnings outcomes of TAACCCT WCC students to a matched comparison group of students in a non-TAACCCT program.
- The study found TAACCCT WCC participation was associated with lower rates of program completion, when compared to comparison group participation. However, tests of statistical significance were not performed.
- The quality of causal evidence presented in this report is low because the authors did not ensure that the groups being compared were similar before the intervention. This means we are not confident that the estimated effects are attributable to TAACCCT-enhanced WCC programs; other factors are likely to have contributed.
Intervention Examined
WCC's enhanced programs
Features of the Intervention
The U.S. Department of Labor's (DOL) Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program provided $1.9 billion in grants to community colleges to improve skills and support employment in high-demand industries, notably manufacturing, health care, information technology, energy, and transportation. Through four rounds of funding, DOL awarded 256 TAACCCT grants to approximately 800 educational institutions across the United States and its territories.
The TAACCCT grant was used by Waubonsee Community College (WCC) to implement four programs: 1) Healthcare Bridge Program, 2) Manufacturing Bridge Program, 3) Laboratory Technology, and 4) Office Software Specialist. The college employed a number of strategies aimed at improving the speed and number of certificate/degree attainments and employment for their students. These included creating and improving online and hybrid Lab Tech courses, installing advisors to support students in the GED/ESL to-credit-course transition and facilitating retention and completion, mandating student success courses, assessing and ameliorating student's academic and skill deficiencies, developing a Laboratory Technology career pathway focused on industry competencies, and creating partnerships with local workforce boards and employment stakeholders to facilitate students’ transitions to employment and provide wraparound support services.
Features of the Study
The study used a nonexperimental design to compare the outcomes of students who participated in the TAACCCT WCC program to students who did not participate in the TAACCCT program. The study was conducted at Waubonsee Community College on the Sugar Grove, Aurora, Plano, and Aurora Fox Valley campuses in Illinois. For the program completion outcome, the authors used propensity score matching to compare 339 treatment group students in the Healthcare, Manufacturing, Laboratory Technology, and Office Support Specialist programs from 2013-2016 to 610 comparison group students who took the NAS101 course within the Nurse Assistant program. For the wage outcome, the authors assessed 43 treatment group students solely in the Healthcare program who had wage data at the beginning of the TAACCCT program and compared their changes in wages through Q2 2015 to wage changes from NAS101 students who also had wage data at program inception. Using data from the WCC databases and the Illinois Department of Employment, the authors conducted statistical tests to examine differences in outcomes between treatment and comparison groups. Outcomes measured included program completion and wage changes from inception until Q2 2015.
Findings
Education and skills gain
- The study found that participation in the TAACCCT-enhanced courses at WCC was associated with lower rates of program completion (36.6% for the treatment group versus 85.6% for the comparison group). However, tests of statistical significance were not performed.
Earnings and wages
- The study found no significant relationship between program participation and wage changes.
Considerations for Interpreting the Findings
When creating the treatment and comparison groups, the authors note that matching techniques were only utilized for the 2013 cohort and not for the 2014 or 2015 cohorts. Additionally, when assessing program completion rates, 26% of treatment group students were still in an ongoing program and were therefore not factored into the program completion rate data. Furthermore, the authors used a cohort of students in a Nursing course to compare to students in Healthcare, Manufacturing, Laboratory Technology, and Office Software programs. The varying curricula of the comparison groups creates a confound. Lastly, while the authors created a matched group of students to compare to the treatment group students, they did not report whether demographic differences between the groups were significant and did not account for other factors that could have affected the difference between the treatment and comparison groups, such as age or pre-intervention levels of education/training. These preexisting differences between the groups—and not the TAACCCT-enhanced WCC programs—could explain the observed differences in outcomes. Therefore, the study is not eligible for a moderate causal evidence rating, the highest rating available for nonexperimental designs.
Causal Evidence Rating
The quality of causal evidence presented in this report is low because the authors did not ensure that the groups being compared were similar before the intervention. This means we are not confident that the estimated effects are attributable to the TAACCT-enhanced WCC programs; other factors are likely to have contributed.