Chapter 9: Workforce Education and Development in the United States

The United States has a highly decentralized, loosely coordinated, locally administered, and mixed public-private system of workforce education and training. Its economy is large, diverse, and dynamic, and has many regional economies that each respond to different market forces and experience different training-related needs (Herschbach & Campbell, 2000). Formal education at the secondary level is usually general in nature. Students acquire high school diplomas, typically after completing 12 years of formal education, despite great diversity in the content of their educational experiences. Some students may have taken mostly college preparatory courses while in high school; others may have had more vocational or commercial coursework, sometimes accompanied by school supervised work experience (Kerckhoff & Bell, 1998).