DECA continues to be a leader in supporting key educational initiatives through its comprehensive learning program. A classroom companion, DECA integrates into classroom instruction, applies learning, connects to business and promotes competition. DECA’s extensive offering of educational programs, ranging from competitive events to corporate partner challenges to school-based enterprises and more, deliver a variety of activities to serve diverse learning styles while also providing multiple assessment methods.

Each academic year, DECA engages more than 285,000 students and supports more than 7,000 teachers in 4,500 high schools and career and technical centers in nearly all 50 United States. 

DECA’s close connection with the state educational agencies supports local high schools and career and technical centers as they strive to provide high-quality CTE that equips learners for a future-ready workforce. As an integral component of CTE, DECA supports high-quality CTE standards in five ways.

• Standards-aligned and Integrated Curriculum
  DECA’s robust competitive events program directly supports courses in the Career Clusters® of Marketing & Sales, Management & Entrepreneurship, Financial Services and Hospitality, Events & Tourism. DECA’s role plays and case studies are developed through industry research to reflect current issues and trends in business and industry. Each role-play and case study supports a Career Cluster® and designated primary instructional area, while connecting to industry-validated performance indicators and career competencies. DECA advisors have access to hundreds of role-plays and case studies searchable in DECA’s advisor resource center, so they can seamlessly integrate these activities into their classroom instruction. DECA is designed to connect to and support your state’s curriculum standards in these career areas.
• Engaging and Rigorous Instruction
  DECA members aren’t just learning about marketing research or project management – they are actually working with a local business to conduct marketing research, or managing large-scale community-based projects with impressive outcomes. DECA’s prepared competitive events bring classroom learning to life by engaging students in meaningful projects that require them to apply their classroom learning to real-world problems. In many cases, DECA members are preparing 20-page business reports or slide decks while also learning how to effectively deliver a business presentation, implementing important career competencies, language arts and mathematics.
• High-Quality Professional Development for Teachers
  Oftentimes business and marketing teachers may be the only teacher of these subjects in their school, but once they join DECA, they become part of a worldwide network of more than 7,000 business and marketing teachers who gain access to DECA’s professional learning offerings and classroom resources. DECA’s advisor professional learning series goes beyond helping DECA advisors learn about the aspects of chapter management; it provides professional development on topics such as classroom engagement, integrating DECA’s competitive events into the classroom, project management, work-based learning, industry insights and more. DECA is committed to providing resources and training to make teaching more effective and enjoyable, with the goal of increasing teachers’ length of service. To support statewide the efforts to recruit, train and retain new teachers, DECA provides this additional support in preparing them to be successful in their classrooms.
• Business and Community Partnerships
  DECA’s extensive portfolio of business partners play a vital role in preparing emerging leaders and entrepreneurs across the Career Clusters® that align with our programs. For example, Adobe and the American Marketing Association support our marketing programs, while Hilton supports our hospitality programs, and American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and Intuit for Education support our finance programs. Not only does DECA’s portfolio of business partners provide insight for the organization, but DECA also encourages engagement with these and local partners at the state and local level.
• Work-based Learning through School-based Enterprises
  Each year, DECA recognizes more than 1,000 School-based Enterprises with gold certification. While thousands of students learn by doing through working in the school store, this certification recognizes the connected learning from the classroom applied in areas such as operations, product/service management, marketing planning, pricing, promotion, selling, human resources management and financial analysis. These school-based enterprises collectively generate over $33 million in sales annually. 

Most importantly, DECA is impacting its student members as they prepare for college and careers. According to a recent survey in partnership with Encourage, DECA members are five times more likely than the typical college student to major in marketing or advertising in college, five times more likely to major in finance, and three times more likely to major in business management or entrepreneurship. More than 79% of DECA members reported taking an AP course in high school, and 77% reported gaining self-confidence and presentation skills through participating in DECA.

DECA continues to support the important work of State CTE Directors and state education agencies, high schools and career and technical centers, as well as our advisors and student members to ensure a future-ready workforce. 

*Survey received responses from 36,668 DECA student members in 2026.

By Frank Peterson, CAE

Executive Director, DECA Inc.

The views, opinions, services, and products shared in this post are solely for educational purposes and do not imply agreement or endorsement by Advance CTE, nor discrimination against similar brands, products, or services not mentioned.