What Works in Healthcare Career and Technical Education: Early Signals from Four Regional Partnerships

This report provides an early look at four new healthcare-focused high schools, examining who they serve, preliminary indicators of student success, and the career pathways, work-based learning, and postsecondary opportunities available in the initiative’s first year.

Authors: Joseph B. Fuller, G. Matthew Snodgrass, Kerry McKittrick, and Nathalie Gazzaneo

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In 2024, a philanthropic funder invested more than $250 million to launch a network of 12 healthcare career and technical education (CTE) high schools across urban and rural communities in the Eastern United States.  Each site is built around a partnership between at least one secondary school, a local healthcare system, and at least one postsecondary partner.  The goal of the partnerships is to prepare students for high-demand, family-sustaining healthcare careers or further postsecondary education. This report explores the earliest data from four sites that launched in the 2024-2025 academic year: Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, and Houston.

The schools share a common vision, but the models are diverse. This variation is both a strength and a challenge, complicating cross-site comparisons but enabling each school to fit its local labor market, district context, and capacity constraints. Given the very early data and the descriptive nature of the examination, the findings in this report should be viewed as preliminary and indicative.

• Early enrollment data from Boston, Dallas, and Houston suggest the initiative is reaching students historically underrepresented in health science CTE programs. The large majority of students are Black or Hispanic/Latino, constituting a greater share of the student population than is seen in statewide CTE health science programs, but in line with their urban districts. Female students are the majority at all three reporting sites, which mirrors long-standing gender patterns in health science CTE. However, Boston and Dallas appear more gender-balanced than their state health science CTE benchmarks, suggesting some progress toward greater inclusion of male students. 

  
  

• Houston—the only currently operating site in which students select a healthcare pathway in ninth grade–offers a preliminary picture of how students sort unevenly into healthcare pathways. The distribution suggests that student preferences and information are shaping pathway choices. Nursing is by far the most popular pathway. In this very early data, gender, race/ethnicity, and home language appear to be associated with pathway choice.

  
  

• Attendance data provides an early view into student engagement levels and underscores the need for targeted student supports in certain cases. Some sites show attendance and chronic absenteeism rates that are generally comparable to or better than their districts, while others exhibit particularly high chronic absenteeism within particular grades and pathways. Female students have higher rates of chronic absenteeism than male students at all three sites. 

  
  

• Work-based Learning (WBL) and postsecondary credit accumulation were not initially planned to begin until students reached the later years of high school, but some sites offered these opportunities to students as early as ninth grade. Postsecondary credit attainment is emerging but not universal.

  
  

As additional sites are launched, additional students matriculate, current students progress, and additional data are reported, the evidentiary basis for robust conclusions and the delineation of trends will grow.

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Please direct inquiries to: G. Matthew Snodgrass (matt_snodgrass@hks.harvard.edu) 

Suggested Citation: Joseph B. Fuller, G. Matthew Snodgrass, et al. (February 2026). What Works in Healthcare Career & Technical Education: Early Signals from Four Regional Partnerships. Published by the Harvard Kennedy School.