About 269,500 public high school students were concentrating in construction coursework in the 2024-25 school year, according to a construction CTE enrollment fact sheet NCCER released Oct. 16. That’s 1.71% of public high school students, the highest share in the four decades the research group charted, and up from 1.09% in 2014-15.
The one-page NCCER fact sheet counts “concentrators,” students who finish a sequence of usually two or three courses in one occupational area. It isn’t a count of every kid who took a shop class.
Construction CTE enrollment over 40 years
The line isn’t a steady climb. NCCER’s estimates put 202,800 students, or 1.50%, in construction coursework in 1981-82. The count fell to 131,800 by 1989-90, recovered to 190,200 in 1997-98 and then went sideways for most of two decades: 170,500 in 2004-05, 190,900 in 2009-10 and 168,400 in 2014-15.
The jump came after that. The estimate hit 238,000 in 2020-21 and 269,500 in 2024-25, a 60% gain over 10 years. NCCER’s own summary is careful, saying participation “has risen since the mid-2000s.”
Why the high school construction numbers need an asterisk
NCCER says tracking methods and definitions changed over time, and it built the series from different sources: older federal transcript studies, Census enrollment tables and, for recent years, Perkins Act concentrator data reported by states to the Education Department. From 2009 on, the figures reflect the full architecture and construction career cluster.
That cluster is broader than the trades. It can include drafting, design and architecture pathways alongside carpentry, electrical and masonry. So the 269,500 figure is an upper bound for students heading toward craft work, and part of the post-2014 gain could reflect how states classify programs rather than more teenagers learning to frame walls. The fact sheet doesn’t split the cluster.
Even with that caveat, the direction lines up with other signals. In the St. Louis Fed’s district, construction made up 53% of registered apprentices last year, and the last two readings in NCCER’s series are the only ones above its 1981-82 starting point.
What contractors can do with the CTE data
A concentrator is a prospect, not a hire. The industry’s problem has rarely been getting students into one class. It’s been converting them into apprentices and keeping them through year three. NCCER’s own workforce development report this month repeated the same recommendations it made in 2018, which says something about how slow that conversion work has been.
For contractors, the useful move is local. Perkins concentrator data is reported by state and by program, so a firm can find which high schools near its work actually run construction sequences and how many students finish them. With about 269,500 students in the pipeline nationally, the competition is no longer only for workers. It’s for the schools that produce them.