Data Platform Paints New Picture of the Journey to the Workforce

The path students take after walking through the doors of their high school for the last time is as unique as the students themselves. Some will go on to a junior college or trade school, some to a four-year university, and others will head straight into the workforce.

Until this week, telling these student stories was more of a conceptual exercise — a percentage of group X from the school district Y went on to a four-year college, etc. But a new tool from the California Cradle-to-Career Data System (C2C) drills down into the varied paths to the workforce, offering new insights for researchers, policymakers and the public.

Data Programs Director Ryan Estrellado explained during a press demo Monday that the Student Pathways Dashboard, officially launched Tuesday, is the culmination of several years of work to tell a series of cohesive, data-based stories. That work began in earnest in 2021, following legislation that created what the state calls its “longitudinal data system.” Since its conception, more than 160 public meetings have helped to shape the tool released this week.

For now, the dashboard tells six data stories: how students in the state navigate to and through college; who enrolls in college; the types of degrees earned; time taken to graduate; income while enrolled in college; and earnings post-graduation.

The broader collection can be filtered by student population and either school district or legislative district. Additional filters can be applied to each of the visualizations.

“… When you look at the way that you can filter this, you've got 9,000 different ways to view just off of the global filters, what that tells me on a practical level is that there are so many ways that people experience life — finishing high school, and then after high school — that makes me really excited for the public to be able to see themselves in it and expand their perception of what life after high school is like,” Estrellado said.

Building the dashboard was hardly done in a vacuum, Estrellado said, noting that multiple partners provided the data needed to assemble pieces of this complex picture. That data was provided by the Department of Education, California State University Chancellor’s Office, University of California Office of the President, Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, Employment Development Department and the Department of Social Services.

“We can only answer questions about where do kids from my high school go after college? How much do they earn later? What does that look like for subgroups like foster youth? We can only answer those questions when we bring together the data across K-12, higher ed, workforce and social services. And there are so many important questions like that that can best be answered by integrated data that's all brought together in one place,” C2C Executive Director Mary Ann Bates said.

As annual data deposits grow, so too will the Student Pathway resource. Right now, there is enough data to show a clear picture of post-high school trajectories to the workforce from 2015, but as more data comes in, that picture will grow and add new facets to these stories.

“It's really important to us that the audience know that our data system is meant to grow. We import data every year, and the products that we build, including this one, will also grow, expanding the amount of time that we can show and the different questions that we can answer,” Estrellado said.

Bates added that recent discussions with the Labor and Workforce Development Agency will see new data added to the mix in future iterations of the tool, painting a clearer picture of how former students are faring in the job market.

“The expansion of the data system to bring in new workforce data will be a really important one for the future,” Bates said of the agency partnership.

A primary question — especially concerning student and social services data — is one of security and privacy. Bates explained that the utmost care is being taken to make sure that confidentiality is protected, but also that the visualizations cannot get so granular that a group or individual is compromised in the process.

“We have a very concrete and specific data privacy protocol in place that ensures that a certain threshold of individuals have to be represented in a data visualization for it to be fully displayed,” Bates said. “We're committed to protecting the confidential records of all Californians and ensuring that privacy protection is core to our work.”

The tool is open to the public and can be reached here.