CREC Attends GEMEnA Meeting in Washington D.C.
December 9, 2014Ken Poole attended a GEMEnA meeting to learn more about the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) plan to implement questions about how many people have postsecondary credentials (licenses and certificates) in the upcoming Current Population Survey.
This represents NCES’ best chance to better understand what “some college” actually means in the American Community Survey’s (ACS) educational attainment category. The GEMEnA project will help NCES to answer questions: “What does some college mean?”; “Does it mean I went to college and dropped out OR does it mean that I went through some kind of job-related program and got an industry-recognized credential that helps me earn more?”
The Interagency Working Group on Expanded Measures of Enrollment and Attainment (GEMEnA) works to develop and validate national measures of the participation in and credentialing of education and training for work, and to build government-wide consensus for the adoption of these measures in key federal data collections.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations. NCES is located within the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences. NCES fulfills a Congressional mandate to collect, collate, analyze, and report complete statistics on the condition of American education; conduct and publish reports; and review and report on education activities internationally.