There were 400 vocational or career and technical high schools in the 2024-2025 school year that enrolled significant numbers of students as their primary institution, according to a Big Local News/Hechinger Report analysis of U.S. Department of Education data and reported in The Hechinger Report. That’s an increase from 254 a decade ago.
Counting all vocational high schools, regardless of whether they enroll students full- or part-time, the figure was higher, about 1,400.
Nationally, boys lag behind girls on multiple measures of educational achievement, from kindergarten readiness to college completion. Technical high schools could be a solution. In one study, boys accepted into Connecticut’s technical schools had better attendance and test scores, and higher graduation rates and earnings than peers who missed the cutoff for admission.
But many students who might thrive in a technical high school are missing out in Connecticut, due to a systemwide shortage of seats. This year, only 44 percent of the 7,850 applicants to the state’s 17 technical schools got in. Those schools enrolled 11,700 students this year. More than 60 percent of students are boys.
“We could add 1,000 more and it would be good for boys, not bad for girls, and give parents more choices,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonprofit research and policy group.
Reeves’ proposal is costly. He puts the price tag of running the new schools at an estimated $4 billion annually, a figure he based on Connecticut’s $5,000 per-student supplement for technical school students. And that doesn’t include construction costs.
Considering the financial challenges many districts now confront, less expensive ways of expanding technical education to more boys are being studied. This could include renting space so existing programs can expand or opening vocational classrooms to students who attend traditional schools at night or on the weekends.
Career and technical education are viewed by many students and families as a debt-free pathway into family-sustaining careers. Policymakers and business leaders say the programs grow the skilled workforce and increase the nation’s economic competitiveness, especially when artificial intelligence is automating some white-collar jobs.
Reeves and other advocates argue that the existing evidence for technical schools is encouraging. They point to the Connecticut research, as well as a recent evaluation of New York City’s P-TECH schools that found that males who attended the vocationally oriented schools were 10 percentage points more likely to have completed an associate degree seven years after enrolling than peers who weren’t admitted to the schools. That study, like the Connecticut one, found no significant gains for females.
Researchers aren’t sure why boys get a bigger boost from attending technical high schools, but a prominent theory is that boys simply have more room to grow than girls, who tend to do pretty well in traditional high schools.
Why do boys at technical schools outperform their peers at traditional high schools? One possibility is that boys find work-based learning at technical high schools to be more relevant than traditional classroom instruction and are more motivated to excel.
“They see the purpose in what they’re doing,” says Michael Crocco, superintendent of the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System. “They can take what they learn in the classroom and put it into practice immediately.”
Smaller class sizes and more time with teachers may also play a role. When students spend all day with a single trade instructor, “that teacher gets to know you on a different level,” Crocco says.
The biggest barrier to building more tech and career schools is money. These schools are costly to build and maintain, require expensive equipment and have low student-faculty ratios, says Alisha Hyslop, chief policy, research and content officer at the Association for Career and Technical Education.
Teacher shortages are another hurdle. In one federal survey, nearly a third of public schools hiring for at least one CTE position said it was difficult or impossible to fill the role. Thirty-five states report critical teacher shortages in high-demand fields like manufacturing, IT and health sciences.
One potential solution to the tech school shortage and their wait lists can be seen in a renovated warehouse in Fitchburg, a former mill town in central Massachusetts.
A few years ago, this building was a 16,000-square-foot shell with cinder block walls that had most recently been used as storage space for a local brewery.
But Katy Whitaker, development coordinator for Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School — or Monty Tech, as it’s known here — saw its potential. The school, which had a waitlist of several hundred students, leased the building in early 2023, and began dividing it into three shops with space for 126 carpentry, electrical and plumbing students.
The satellite campus, dubbed MVP Academy, cost considerably less to construct than a new building, and is providing a second chance to juniors and seniors who didn’t get in as eighth graders.
Students divide their time between the comprehensive high school where they remain enrolled and MVP, where they spend every other week learning the fundamentals of electrical work.
The arrangement ensures that comprehensive high schools can keep their per-student assessment, while Monty Tech gets the supplement that the state pays schools for educating vocational students.
MVP can’t accommodate every waitlisted student, but it may be a more realistic approach than new school construction, says state Sen. John Cronin, whose district includes Monty Tech. He helped secure $15 million in a recent state spending bill for the creation of similar “annexes” in other communities.
“We don’t need more cafeterias and gyms,” says Cronin. “We need more shops where kids can get relevant workforce training.”
Massachusetts has also invested millions over the past few years in programs that allow students enrolled in traditional high schools to take classes at technical high schools after regular school hours, and on weekends.
In Connecticut, a nonprofit organization, The Justice Education Center, runs after-school and summer programs at the state’s technical schools, offering pre-apprenticeship training and certification to hundreds of at-risk young adults each year.
The ultimate answer may not be expanding access to technical schools but bringing elements of those schools — like career exploration and hands-on, project-based learning — into traditional classrooms. Even if Reeves realizes his vision of building 1,000 more schools, most boys will still attend traditional high schools.
That might mean expanding programs like Massachusetts’ Innovation Career Pathways, which offer students in comprehensive high schools 100 hours or more of work experience in a high demand field, or programs in New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut, that provide technical training during the school day through union partnerships.
“I don’t think we necessarily have to build brand new technical high schools,” says one expert. “But how can we increase opportunities for these types of in-depth career experiences?”
The Hechinger Report
