Media Release: NCER Awards $1 million to WSAC and MDRC
The National Center for Education Research has awarded $1 million to WSAC and MDRC to support the investigation of school-to-work pathways.
April 9, 2024
OLYMPIA—The Washington Student Achievement Council (WSAC) is excited to announce new funding to expand the scope of an ongoing research project that investigates the options available to young adults exiting high school. The project—with $1 million newly awarded from the National Center for Education Research (NCER)1—is in partnership with MDRC, a nonprofit research organization, and supported with data from the Washington Education Research & Data Center (ERDC).
The project explores how Washington students transition from school to the workforce, including traditional college degree pathways, non-degree pathways and workforce pathways. These analyses will help identify common pathways that lead to better academic and labor market outcomes, across the state and regionally. The project team will also engage with practitioners and learners to better inform understanding of critical pivot points in identified pathways of interest. These findings will help identify which policies could be most effective in influencing students’ post-high school trajectories.
“After leaving high school, students face many options for what comes next. We want to help them make informed decisions about their futures, and this innovative research will surface evidence-based insights that we can share with learners and families,” said Michael Meotti, executive director at WSAC.
The objectives for this new award complement the existing funding and provide a critical avenue for sharing key learning with academic and research audiences. The award is indicative of Washington State’s prominence in conversations that seek to identify how best to leverage evidence to inform policy. Toward that end, the project team will develop open-sourced code and artifacts that can support other states’ similar efforts to unpack school-to-work trajectories.
1 The award number is R305S240017 and the exact award amount is $999,584.