PathTech Tampa Bay (DUE #1104214)

Successful Academic and Employment Pathways in Advanced Technologies

PathTech Tampa Bay examines pathways into high school and community college engineering technology (ET) programs, and to and from the local workforce. PathTech TB completed interviews with 175 unique individuals from high school, community colleges, and industry recruited with help from FLATE. 

  • 67 ET A.S. degree students at four community colleges
  • 4 ET faculty and administrators at four community colleges
  • 27 employers from local technology and advanced manufacturing businesses
  • 70 high school engineering or ET career academy students at four high schools
  • 4 high school career academy teachers and 3 district STEM curriculum administrators

Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and thematically coded. Coding trees were developed based on a priori and emergent themes. Case studies comprehensively described the experiences of the six community college women and profiles of industry companies and employers (Smith 2017). These well-established qualitative methods identified both emergent and saturated themes in the data. The community college student interviewees also completed a short survey with questions about age, marital and caregiving status, educational attainment, funding sources of their ET degree, and parental educational attainment. PathTech TB also utilized national data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97) on education and employment pathways.  The project team tracked a cohort of 1997 high school graduates through early adulthood by collecting data on their schooling, employment, and personal histories (Fletcher and Tyson 2017).