Career and technical education (CTE) programs have been proposed as a strategy for supporting transition to independence among students with disabilities. We exploit a discontinuity created by admissions thresholds to estimate the causal impact of attending a CTE high school on the short- and long-term outcomes of students with disabilities. Our findings suggest that attending CTE high schools has large positive effects on completing high school on time, employment, and earnings. Attending CTE schools also results in more time spent with typically developing peers and higher 10th-grade test scores. These results appear concentrated among male students, but the sample of female students is too small to support strong conclusions about outcomes. Notably, these effects appear broad based over disability type and time spent with typically developing peers in eighth grade.
Brunner et al. (Tue,) studied this question.