While industry increasingly looks to recognized credentials, we still know little about the pathways through which these credentials contribute to higher education success and early economic mobility. This project uses statewide Michigan data—guided by a principal investigator with 15 years of experience working with the state—to understand how skills translate to adult outcomes and to examine students’ postsecondary pathways, including how focused they are on career-aligned course sequences and how efficiently they move through required sequences into the labor market. The study evaluates whether high school skill‑based industry credentials are valid, fair, and predictive measures of students’ technical skills (beyond other academic skills) and whether earning the credentials improves career clarity and early in‑field postsecondary momentum. Using administrative data, the team will map credentials and academic records to O*NET skill categories through natural language processing; will test convergent, divergent, and predictive validity of the resulting skill measures; and will construct a course‑network‑based behavioral indicator of career clarity that captures both focus and momentum. The skills represented by credentials will be validated using postsecondary course‑taking patterns and indicators of career‑aligned progression.

Data Sources 

• Data: Michigan K–12 and postsecondary data, including high school course taking, Career and Technical Education (CTE) credentials, assessment records (e.g., ACT WorkKeys, SAT, AP/IB scores) and web-scraped descriptions of credentials and O*NET content
• Early Mobility Outcomes: Postsecondary enrollment and coursetaking from Michigan Student Transcript and Academic Record Repository (STARR), National Student Clearinghouse postsecondary enrollment and completion records, and a novel measure of career clarity and in-field momentum