CTE Course Enrollment

Highlights

Record Level: Student by Year by Course
Population: Students in the Michigan Career and Technical Education system
Records per Year: 230,000-320,000
Years Covered: 2010-Present

Description

Course information is reported by CTE programs to OCTE, including student enrollment. This dataset includes the local programs' information regarding the courses that a student is enrolled in.

Local Information

Course information is reported in a variety of ways across schools and districts, with a variety of different organizational principles. The course name and section provided are local descriptions of these courses, and not standardized in a way that makes them comparable to each other.

These local course names are also not comparable to information in the K12 Coursework file. The same course may be listed in both places, but different collection practices, different collecting agencies (OCTE and CEPI), and different collection times can lead to courses being identified differently across the two datasets.

Similar to the K12 Coursework file, credits earned are reported, but not credits attempted. Projects and calculations that require credits attempted can attempt to use the maximum credits earned in a given course, but this is not a surefire method and extensive cleaning may be needed.

Teacher Information

Not every teacher who teachers a CTE course is a public school employee. These teachers not employed at a public school but still teaching CTE courses are post-secondary instructors or area professionals. Teachers employed at a public school receive an RPIC, a randomly generated identifier, while those who are not public school employees do not. This can lead to gaps where a course does not have an associated RPIC.

In some years, teachers without an RPIC did receive an internal staff ID, which is provided in place of an RPIC where applicable.

In 2019 and before, multiple teachers may be reported for an individual course. Where present, extra staff are typically support staff. The dataset includes a second and third RPIC where applicable in these years.

Teachers with an RPIC can be joined to our K12 staff file for more information.

Course Subsection

Subsections are collected separately from course sections but schools may choose to report students in separate CTEIS course sections who are in the same room with the same teacher at the same time, but are receiving instruction to different program standards (different segments or competencies). 

Schools may choose to report students in different subsections in the same CTEIS course section. It is up to the school to choose. For example, a “class” that meets in room 101 with Mr. Smith at 8am includes both 1st year and 2nd year students receiving instruction to the 1st year and 2nd year program standards respectively. The 1st year students could be reported in one course section and the 2nd year students reported in a different course section, or 1st year students could be reported in subsection A of a course section and 2nd year students reported in subsection B of the same course section.

Subsections were originally created when there was a cap on the number of students that could generate 61a1 funding (a Perkins IV core performance indicator) in a course section with one teacher, so reporting students being taught to different segments or competencies in the same class could not be reported as separate course sections (because doing so would defeat the CTEIS programming to prevent funding more students than allowable). With the change to the 61a1 funding formula in 2014-15, the cap was removed so districts could report groups of students in the same class who were receiving different instruction as different course sections, removing the need for subsections. However, by this point many districts had adjusted their local student information systems to use subsections so many chose to continue to use them.

Key Variables

This dataset provides program-assigned course names for each course and the grade the student received in the course. Teacher information, course credits, and course begin and end dates are also included.