Publication Spotlight: Insights from Twenty Years of Biotechnology Credential Data
I have been interested in the life sciences for almost my whole life. So there is no question to me that biotechnology is immensely important. And therefore biotechnology/biomanufacturing education is immensely important. Yet perhaps not everyone feels the same way. The labs can be expensive to set up and teach, the concepts can be challenging to understand—really, what makes a successful program?
I won’t tell you how much money the biotechnology sector brings to the American economy, but the authors of the recently published paper “Insights from Twenty Years of Biotechnology Credential Data” will, and without a trained workforce, biotechnology cannot happen. How and where that training happens successfully is a question that should be answered, although it turns out the data are not as easily gathered as you may think. Luckily, the National Science Foundation-funded InnovATEBIO program (you are probably on their website when you are reading this blog!) has tracked the biotechnology programs at community colleges for 20 years, and after correlating that data set with others the authors have unearthed some valuable insights.
Getting to those insights was not easy. The data were found in two main places, and had to be cleaned, collated, and analyzed. The first source of information was, as mentioned, at InnovATEBIO. The second set was from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, within the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Data was gathered from both the NCES College Navigator site (an easy to use web-based search tool) or the IPEDS Custom Data files.
There was an unexpected difficulty in the analysis however, as the information was not uniformly reported by the colleges. However the authors were able to work through that and found a number of interesting insights. First, the number of credentialed completions increased from 2002 to 2016 with a high of 1545 completions in 2016. The numbers then dropped, both before and during Covid, and as of 2023 (most recent data) the numbers have risen to 1528, due to an increase in certificates. The number of associates degrees has been dropping since 2016 and Bachelor's degree programs, although increasing in number at community colleges, do not yet make up a substantial segment of credentials. The population of students that completed biotech credentials has become more diverse over time, even though the number of associates programs has declined.
Moving forward, it will be important to carefully study those programs that have shown robust growth in order to learn what practices have led to their success. Overall, the publication covered not only what the data could tell us, but also demonstrated some of the pitfalls while integrating datasets and why it is important to check every step of the way so that inaccuracies do not slide in!
- S. Porter, T. Smith, and L. Fletcher. Insights from Twenty Years of Biotechnology Credential Data Journal of Advanced Technological Education 2025 Vol. 4, Issue 1. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14728318