• Introduction
• Findings
• Conclusion
• References

While most young people enroll in postsecondary education shortly after graduating from high school, not all choose this path. A minority of high school students—referred to as the “non-college-bound”—go directly into the labor market after obtaining their high school diploma. How these students fare in the world of work is of direct concern for educators. The U.S. economy in the late 1980s has been characterized as a new economy—one that demanded high skills of workers and in which ill-prepared persons would not do well. It was also feared that the high school curriculum of the day did not adequately train students for the workplace.

Previous research analyzing the relationships between high school experiences and labor market outcomes suggests that while secondary academic and vocational courses provide only small wage benefits in the first few years after graduation, academic achievement and high school work experience are associated with labor market success (U.S. Department of Education 1994; Bishop 1985; Meyer and Wise 1979). To focus on academic coursework by way of example, there appears to be only modest evidence that such coursework is rewarded by employers, despite their claims that it is general skills that they would like young workers to bring into the workplace (SCANS 1991). Rumberger and Daymont (1982) found that taking additional academic courses including mathematics, English, science, social science, and foreign languages significantly reduced the unemployment rates of young men and women who did not go to college and significantly increased the wage rate and number of hours worked for women. On the other hand, Bishop found evidence indicating that taking a greater number of semesters of academic courses negatively affected employment and earnings.

This report uses data from the High School and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 1980 Sophomores, “Fourth Follow-up” (HS&B-So:80/92), to examine the labor market outcomes of a cohort of non-college-bound students who graduated from high school in 1982. Many of the previous studies of non-college-bound youth cited above have examined the economic returns to education immediately following high school or perhaps 2 or 3 years after graduation. This report uses longitudinal data to examine not only these short-term outcomes, but also the economic returns to high school experiences almost a decade after the cohort graduated from high school.

This report examines the economic status of non-college-bound high school graduates in 1983 (1 year after most had graduated from high school) and 1991 (9 years after scheduled graduation). The findings generally confirm previous research showing a modest association of high school coursework with females’ short-term labor market outcomes. Grades in high school academic and specific labor market preparation (SLMP) courses also had modest associations with early labor market outcomes for both males and females. However, these associations were short lived and had disappeared by 1991.

The number of vocational courses taken was either associated with poorer earnings and unemployment or was not significantly associated with economic outcomes in both 1983 and 1991. The one exception was credits earned in SLMP courses: as the number of SLMP credits earned rose, so did the earnings and weeks employed for females in 1983.

Working during high school was prevalent among non-college-bound 1982 high school graduates, and the findings indicate that the experience was beneficial to new graduates as they made a transition into the labor force (table A). In addition, work experience in high school was positively associated with both early and later labor market success for female graduates.

Controlling for personal characteristics, this study found that academic achievement and work experience while in high school were positively related to several measures of short-term labor market success for non-college-bound students, although females appeared to benefit more than males. Students who either earned higher grades in SLMP and academic courses or who worked during high school tended to earn more and were employed more consistently than their peers their first year out of high school. On the other hand, the associations between the labor market experiences and academic and vocational coursetaking of the non-college-bound population were generally not significant—in either the short term or long term. In other words, what this group of students actually took in high school, after controlling for demographic characteristics, did not appear to matter to their short- or long-term earnings nor to their long-term employment status.

Bishop, J. (1985). High School Graduates in the Labor Market. Canton, OH: National Center for Research in Vocational Education.

Meyer, R.H., and Wise, D. (1979). High School Preparation and Early Labor Force Experience (Working Paper 342). Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

Rumberger, R., and Daymont, T. (1982). The Economic Value of Academic and Vocational Training Acquired in High School. Stanford, CA: Institute for Research on Educational Finance and Governance.

Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills. (1991). What Work Requires of Schools: A SCANS Report for America 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.

U.S. Department of Education. (1994). National Assessment of Vocational Education Final Report to Congress, Volume II. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.