Yet another mechanism of generating information about the labor market is to follow students as they leave the institution and to collect evidence about their employment and earnings over time. While this does not provide information about specific employers, it does allow instructors and institutions to analyze the patterns of employment among students--whether students in specific occupational areas find employment related to their field of study, whether their employment is stable rather than intermittent, what wage rates they earn, whether they advance over time or not--in ways that are useful to students trying to decide what occupations to enter and to institutions trying to identify weak programs.
However, student tracking systems are not well-developed in most community colleges across the country. A few states like Florida, Minnesota, and Ohio have developed tracking systems relying on telephone surveys of former students; Florida requires vocational programs to maintain a seventy percent related placement rate; and Ohio reviews programs whose placement falls below seventy-five percent. California has funded a pilot project to follow up vocational students, but response rates are typically in the range of ten to twenty-five percent, making the results highly suspect; the studies have been carried out only in a sample of community colleges and only erratically, every three years or so; and while there is general awareness that such follow-ups exist, no instructors or administrators were able to recall the results from any study. Methods of tracking students that rely on unemployment insurance records rather than questionnaires to former students are now being tested in a number of states, but this approach is still in its early stages (see Baj, Trott, & Stevens, 1991; on approaches to student follow-up, see Palmer, 1990). The result is that there is no usable information about the subsequent employment of occupational students or the success of particular programs. An accounting instructor at Rosefield City College--an individual who admitted that community college certificates and associate degrees are "almost useless in private industry" because of their hiring B.A.s--mused, "You know, I've often wondered what happens to two-year students," admitting that most of the students he knew personally had transferred to four-year colleges to earn B.A.s in accounting.
It is likely that student follow-up systems will improve in the future. The 1990 Amendments to the Perkins Act require states to develop performance measures for their secondary and postsecondary institutions receiving federal funds. Most states have adopted some measure of placement for their postsecondary institutions (Hoachlander & Rahn, 1992). While there is no requirement to implement these systems of performance measures or to impose sanctions on low-performing programs, most observers feel that improved student tracking systems are likely to emerge in most states from this federal impetus. One result would be to provide better information to students about the employment consequences of the various programs they could enter and to alert institutions to programs which have low rates of placing students in related employment--information which is now almost completely missing.