Center for Education and Career Development

The Center for Education and Career Development supports access and success in higher education and bridges the gaps between education and workforce success by:

• Exploring and developing new tools to improve the fairness, equity and efficacy of the applications and admissions process in higher education
• Advancing workplace training and assessment
• Advancing the knowledge, skills and competencies that are critical to workplace success

Focus areas

• Understand current admissions practices and the challenges of holistic admissions, with or without admissions test scores
• Develop a matching system to help advance equity and diversity in higher education admissions
• Understand students' career choices and the impact of career pathways and credentials, and develop capabilities to promote student success through better preparations for academic and career pathways
• Develop tools and platforms to train, improve, assess and certify critical competencies — including critical thinking, collaborative problem-solving and communication skills — for individual learners at different levels of higher education and in the workforce
• Collaborate with other divisions of ETS and with external researchers and organizations (e.g., higher education institutions, employers, government agencies and nonprofit organizations) to forge alliances around the topics listed above

Current projects

Kyllonen, P., Klieger, D., & Zwick, R. (2021). Combining Information to Enhance Admissions Decisions and Student Development.

A primary goal of this project is to explore and validate the use of FACETS^® engine, a non-cognitive assessment in the context of college and graduate admissions.

Haviland, S. (2021). CTE Pathways: Education-to-Work Alignment, Access, and Equity Issues. In this project, researchers focus on multiple aspects around the CTE population, including decision making of taking different CTE pathways, noncredit programs, training of career development and essential skills, and factors predicting academic and job success.

Ling, G. & Holtzman, S. (2021). Exploring New Approaches for Higher Ed Admissions: Using Analytics and Focusing on Equity.

Researchers focus on a better understanding of students' application behaviors, alternate admission models and approaches, and developing initial algorithms of recommendation and matching around college and graduate admissions.

Andrews Todd, J. & Ling, G., (2021). Exploration of assessment and learning tools for critical competencies in higher education and workforce settings.

The primary goals of this project are to explore the value of critical thinking and collaborative problem-solving in the context of higher education and pilot assessment and learning tools around these critical competencies.