• Reference

Coming of Age in the 1990s: The Eighth-Grade Class of 1988 12 Years Later examines the findings of the fourth follow-up to NELS:88. The primary message of this statistical analysis report is that "the rich get richer." There are many varieties of riches, but here I refer specifically to the socioeconomic status of eighth-graders' families and to eighth-grade mathematics achievement. The social advantages enjoyed by some eighth-graders translate into higher rates of high school completion, postsecondary attendance, and educational attainment. In turn, the higher postsecondary attainments of advantaged eighth-graders lead to careers in which computers are used frequently and that offer more job training.

Similarly, those youth with higher mathematics achievement in eighth grade are more likely to complete high school and go on to obtain a bachelor's or higher degree. They too are much more likely to use computers frequently on the job—particularly for technical, spreadsheet, or data work, for word-processing, or to send e-mail—and to receive on-the job training. And by age 25, students who had been in the highest quartile in mathematics achievement in the eighth grade in 1988 were earning 23 percent more per year in 1999 than students who had been in the lowest quartile. Over time this gap may widen, and of course the cumulative gap in earnings rises sharply over the years.

Whether this pattern of cumulating advantages and disadvantages is good public policy is a very complex question, and individuals' judgments about this question often depend on whether they see themselves as advantaged or disadvantaged. In many cases there are competing explanations of how these patterns of academic and social advantage and disadvantage emerge. One of the great strengths of the fourth follow-up to NELS:88 is that it provides a new vantage point for exploring these explanations. Much has happened in the lives of these eighth-graders since they were initially surveyed in 1988, and many of the events that we associate with the transition to adulthood—completing full-time schooling, beginning a regular job, and forming a family—occurred between 1994, the timing of the third follow-up to NELS:88, and 2000, the date of this most recent (and possibly final) snapshot of the accomplishments of this cohort. Our ability to comprehend this transition, and what it says about the process that guides educational and occupational success, would have been severely compromised if our last contact had been in 1994, when many of the youth in this cohort were but 20 years old.

If we are likely to learn so much from studying the young adult years of ages 20 to 26, why stop there? Might we not learn as much from further follow-ups? Long-term follow-ups of the 8th-, 10th- and 12th-grade cohorts surveyed in the NCES Longitudinal Studies Program have always seemed to be afterthoughts—luxuries rather than necessities. I can posit several reasons why this might be so. First, the Longitudinal Studies Program has not had adequate financial or political support nor has it captured the policy interests of other NCES periodic surveys. Second, there always seems to be more public and political interest in this year's crop of students than in the ongoing accomplishments of some older group of students. Third, in the early years of the Longitudinal Studies Program, there was a consensus that much of the action took place in high school, with the subsequent experiences and accomplishments of youth simply a straightforward extrapolation of the sorting and selecting that took place in the secondary school years.

The design of NELS:88 reflected a growing interest in the middle grades. But the sampling of eighth-graders in the base year of the study produced logistical nightmares, as many more students changed schools between the base year and first follow-up than could have been anticipated on the basis of the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 or the High School and Beyond studies. The return of ELS:2002 to a cohort of 10th-graders reflects the high cost of tracing and resurveying highly mobile students. It is, I trust, a decision driven more by budgetary realities than by a dismissal of the importance of the middle years of K–12 education.

Policymakers remain focused on elementary and secondary schooling. It is at these levels that the United States has what can best be described as a system of public (and private) education, and age-graded compulsory schooling laws make clear that the state's commitment to educating the young does not yet extend beyond high school. One would be hard-pressed to characterize postsecondary education as a system, given the tremendous variety of postsecondary institutions and the limited oversight offered by the federal government and the states. There is much more consensus on what all students should learn in elementary and secondary school than there is regarding the curricular content of postsecondary schooling. Consequently, policymakers gravitate toward issues that seem amenable to government intervention, and K–12 schooling seems much more tractable than the jumbled world of higher education. It seems only natural that NCES would respond in kind.

The results from the fourth follow-up to NELS:88 tell a different story, however. They point to an important shift in the careers of America's youth. Three-quarters of the members of the eighth-grade cohort of 1988 had participated in postsecondary education by the year 2000 (roughly by age 26), and nearly one-half of the cohort reported some postsecondary schooling, but no bachelor's degree. Some fraction of these youth are likely en route to a bachelor's degree, but many of them have histories of intermittent, part-time enrollment that may not culminate in any postsecondary credential at all. Nearly two-thirds of the 1988 eighth-graders who participated in postsecondary education transferred credits, and one in nine attended more than one institution at the same time. In the year 2000, 80 percent of those still enrolled in postsecondary education were working for pay at the same time.

What these data suggest is greater complexity in the individual trajectories, or careers, that characterize the movement from adolescence to adulthood. We know rather little about the lives and careers of this emerging group of postsecondary enrollees. They are schooled, but are they skilled? The social and economic drawbacks associated with dropping out of high school are well known, and the advantages of completing a bachelor's degree are equally clear. It is the expanding group in the middle that remains a mystery; some fly under the radar of statistical surveys such as the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, while those in the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study lack some of the information about prior educational experiences needed to place their postsecondary schooling in appropriate context.

Education has become a recurring activity in the lives of American adults. Data from the Adult Education Survey of the National Household Education Surveys Program show that nearly one-half of all adults participated in some form of adult education in 1999. This represents a substantial increase from 1991, when approximately one in three adults participated in adult education. The rates are particularly high for 25- to 34-year-olds, 60 percent of whom reported participation in adult education. But they are not much lower for 35- to 54-year-olds, of whom roughly 50 percent participated in some form of adult education (Creighton and Hudson 2002).

Understanding the role that schooling now plays in the lives of American adults may require a more expansive view than previous follow-ups in the Longitudinal Studies Program have provided. It is a truism in social research that the timing of the observations of a phenomenon of interest should be synchronized with changes in that phenomenon. Things that change quickly must be observed more frequently; things that do not change over long stretches of time need not be observed so often. Whereas it was once safe to assume that leaving school had a sense of finality about it, nowadays movement in and out of the education system—both formal and informal—occurs frequently, and over long stretches of time. If so many young adults are participating in adult education, our understanding of the antecedents and consequences of such participation might benefit from continuing follow-ups of the NELS:88 cohort and of future cohorts such as the high school sophomores sampled in ELS:2002.

Coming of Age in the 1990s also points to the importance of interinstitutional linkages—the linkages between secondary education and postsecondary education, education and work, and education and the family. These linkages have always been a bit of a blind spot for NCES. The Longitudinal Studies Program has devised a series of studies of individuals, not of social institutions. With the exception of the secondary school as a context, most of the available data on institutional contexts for learning and human development stem from respondents' self-reports. Such self-reports are necessarily incomplete representations of complex institutions such as work and family.

We learn from the report, for example, that NELS:88 cohort members who had received no postsecondary education by the year 2000 are substantially less likely than their peers with some postsecondary education or a bachelor's degree to have received job training in the previous 12 months. But we have few tools for explaining this variant of the "rich get richer" story. Do those with less education choose to pursue job training less often than those with more education, or do firms systematically cultivate the talents of their more educated employees? Absent heroic efforts to gather independent information on employers (e.g., firm personnel policies) and link the data to the individual NELS:88 respondents, the study design does not allow us to adjudicate between these two possibilities.

Recent theorizing in studies of education and the life course has placed the opportunity structure in the foreground and individual decisionmaking in the background. Considering both individual agency and social structure, however, provides a more complete accounting of coming of age than focusing on one to the exclusion of the other. Longitudinal studies such as NELS:88 have been quite successful at documenting the choices that individuals make; they have been less so at illuminating the structural constraints on choice that are represented in interinstitutional linkages. This can best be remedied by gathering more data on the institutional contexts in which individuals act.

It's easy to sit on the sidelines and take potshots at complex studies; it's a wonder that it doesn't happen more often. But I would not want my suggestions for enhancing the utility of the follow-ups of NELS:88 and the new ELS:2002 study to detract from my overall assessment that these studies are a sound investment in understanding contemporary American life. By illuminating the important role of secondary and postsecondary schooling in creating productive adult members of society, the Longitudinal Studies Program of NCES continues to inform public debate about quality and inequality in American education.

Creighton, S., and Hudson, L. (2002). Participation Trends and Patterns in Adult Education: 1991 to 1999 (NCES 2002–119). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.