Bailey, T., Hughes, K., & Barr, T. (1998). Achieving scale and quality in school-to-work internships: Findings from an employer survey (MDS-902). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.

SAMPLE AND METHODOLOGY

• The Sample
• How the Survey Data Were Collected

The Sample

       The first step in collecting the data was to choose a sample of schools involved in school-to-work activities. We attempted to choose initiatives in which students were spending a significant amount of time in work-based learning outside of the classroom because we believed that these would be the programs which require the most commitment from employer partners. In total, thirteen efforts at ten sites, both long-running and newly established, were selected as research sites; however, only five of these are survey sites.[4] The five survey site programs are City-as-School in New York City, Kalamazoo Education for Employment in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the cooperative education program at LaGuardia Community College in New York City, the Greater Lehigh Valley Youth Apprenticeship program in Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Education for Employment School-to-Careers system (see Figure A).

City-as-School High School

       City-as-School is an alternative New York City High School, grades 10-12, which opened its doors in 1972. The Manhattan branch (there are sites in other New York City boroughs) which we studied enrolls approximately 650 students. This is a unique school for at-risk students which awards high school credits for the completion of internships along with specified sets of related activities. For example, to receive an English credit, a student must do a substantial amount of writing at the work site, as well as complete a Learning Experience Activities Packet (LEAP), which is a curriculum guide often specifically tailored for that particular internship. In-school classes are offered, but most students spend more time in work-based learning than in the classroom; before graduating, most students will have had eight to twelve different internships (called "Learning Experiences") around the city. The school maintains a databank of over 350 employers who offer work-based learning experiences to their students.

Kalamazoo Education for Employment

       The Education for Employment program in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a school-to-work system founded on a strong relationship between educational institutions and the local business community. Begun in 1986, the system currently offers programs in twenty-five different career clusters, and over 2,000 students in grades 8 through 12 are enrolled. During their senior year, students take part in co-op education, externships, or apprenticeships, as well as occupationally based classroom work. Over one hundred employers offer work-based learning, and scores of other employers are involved through business advisory committees.

LaGuardia Community College

       LaGuardia Community College was established in 1971 in New York City as the country's first community college with a mandatory cooperative education requirement; it enrolled 500 students that year. Today, it is nationally recognized as a leader in cooperative education and is one of the largest co-op programs in the United States. Student enrollment has grown to approximately 10,000, and every year 2,000 students are placed with over 300 employers. Individual internships are often sought which relate to the student's course of study, and students attend seminars in which they study issues such as workplace cultures and career-building skills.

Greater Lehigh Valley Youth Apprenticeship Program in Pennsylvania

       The Lehigh Valley Youth Apprenticeship Program, begun in 1994, ceased operating in 1997 after the main school district feeding the initiative withdrew in order to create its own apprenticeship program. It was a two-year magnet high school, which at the time of our study enrolled approximately 85 students and placed them into paid internships. Students spent alternating weeks in the classroom, with a newly created team-taught curriculum, and on the job, where they could remain with the same employer for the full two years. At the time of our survey, the program had 44 employer partners in a wide range of industries.

Education for Employment School-to-Careers System in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

       The school-to-careers initiative in Philadelphia is part of a larger effort to restructure the entire secondary school system around Small Learning Communities, a range of theme programs available in the 22 comprehensive high schools. After five years, school-to-careers coordinators are now placing over 1,500 juniors and seniors (1,100 at the time of our research) in paid work-based learning one or two days per week. The number of specific career areas available has grown to six: (1) manufacturing, (2) business, (3) health, (4) hospitality and tourism, (5) printing, and (6) transportation. At the time of our survey, 179 employers provided work-based learning placements to students; this number has since grown to over 200.

How the Survey Data Were Collected

       We asked each program for a list of employers currently participating in the program. We then attempted to create a matching sample of nonparticipating establishments in the area. To do this, we used the Dun and Bradstreet Database, which lists a broad firm size category (less than 10 employees, 10-49 employees, more than 50 employees) and SIC code for all known establishments in a given geographic region (this data is accessed online and updated monthly; we used it in March of 1996). We first calculated a size-industry breakdown for the participating establishments in each program along the three size categories and ten 1-digit SIC categories. We then used the Dun and Bradstreet Database to calculate a similar size-industry breakdown for all establishments in the programs' regions. Based on a predicted 60% response rate for participating establishments and a 25% response rate for nonparticipating establishments, we created equal-sized samples of participating and nonparticipating establishments. The actual response rates were 61% for the participants and 35% for the nonparticipants. The nonparticipants were somewhat oversampled in the industry-size groups where the internships were concentrated, while the participant sample was proportionate to the participant population in industry-size breakdown.

       We then sent a letter to each of the establishments in our samples. The establishments in the participant sample received a letter directly from their program; those in the nonparticipant sample received a letter from the Institute on Education and the Economy and the RAND Corporation (which conducted the survey). Next, we conducted about 50 pretest surveys and revised the questionnaire based on the responses from those pretests. The resulting questionnaire had an average response time of about 30-35 minutes. The final survey was conducted from May to August of 1996. It was broken down into two major sections. The first section for participants asked for information about the firm's participation in the program, and was answered by the person supervising the interns or coordinating the firm's participation. In the nonparticipant version, the first section asked about hypothetical concerns that firms might have about participating in a school-to-work program. The second section (for both samples) asked for general characteristics of the establishment--employee demographics and turnover, human resources policies, and so on--and was answered by a human resources manager.

       Out of 548 participating employers and 900 nonparticipating employers on our calling list, we were able to gather 334 complete responses from participating employers and 323 complete responses from nonparticipants, resulting in response rates of 61.0% and 35.9% respectively.[5] The breakdown of the sample by area is detailed in Appendix A. (Appendix B compares the industry and occupational distribution for the respondents and nonrespondents.) The most important conclusion that arises from the comparison between these two groups is that the larger firms were more likely to respond than smaller firms. While firms with fewer than 10 workers represented 45% of the completed surveys, they represented 57% of the nonrespondents.

[4] The thirteen programs are Shell Youth Services Academy (Los Angeles, CA), New Visions Medical Careers (Rochester, NY), New Visions Graphic Communications (Rochester, NY), Madison-Oneida BOCES Manufacturing Technologies Program (Madison-Oneida County, NY), Education for Employment School-to-Careers system (Philadelphia, PA), Greater Lehigh Valley Youth Apprenticeship Program (PA), New York City High School of Economics and Finance, Financial Learning Academy of Genesee (Flint, MI), Manufacturing Technologies Partnership (Flint, MI), Careers in Health (Flint, MI), LaGuardia Community College (NYC), City-As-School High School (NYC), and Kalamazoo County Education for Employment (Kalamazoo, MI).

[5] For the participants, a representative sample of about 75 firms was collected for each area, with the exception of Lehigh. For this case, an attempt was made to collect the entire population of firms; 32 were successfully obtained. The five participating programs are not representative of some larger population of participants, although they were chosen to capture diverse geographic and industrial features. To this end, we weight each participating firm equally in our study. While this underrepresents Lehigh, we have just argued that the selection of these areas was not part of a larger sampling design, so the "natural" sample size actually collected is appropriate. The nonparticipants were sampled to capture the distribution of firms in the geographic areas, so their sample weights reflect this. These samples were all of comparable size. To adjust for the unevenness of the sample sizes in the participant sample, we re-weighted the nonparticipant weights to reflect the proportion of the sample covered by each participant. For example, while the Lehigh nonparticipant sample is just as large as that of any other area, its participant sample is unusually small. If we include these firms without downweighting, then Lehigh's nonparticipant sample contributes about twice as many firms to the sample as the participant sample does. Our adjustment to the weights corrects this imbalance.

Bailey, T., Hughes, K., & Barr, T. (1998). Achieving scale and quality in school-to-work internships: Findings from an employer survey (MDS-902). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.