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Studying Facets of the United States Labor Market with National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Data

Paper Session

Friday, Jan. 4, 2019 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Atlanta Marriott Marquis, A707
Hosted By: American Economic Association & Committee on Economic Statistics
  • Chair: Lowell Taylor, Carnegie Mellon University

Why Is the Rate of College Dropout So High?

Alison Aughinbaugh
,
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Maury Gittleman
,
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Charles R. Pierret
,
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Abstract

During most of the twentieth century, the U.S. led the world in the percentage of its population with a
college education; today, that lead has vanished. Sparked in part by the growth in the college wage
premium, the proportion of high school graduates going on to post‐secondary school has been on the rise in recent decades. However, this increase in college attendance has not resulted in a proportionate rise in the number of those with four year‐degrees, because the United States has the highest dropout rate in the developed world. With a
college education said to be increasingly necessary to compete in the labor market, it is important to
understand why so many individuals do not achieve success in postsecondary institutions. We address
this issue by examining the college attendance and completion experience of two cohorts of the
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), that from 1979 and that from 1997. The percentage of high school completers who attend college rose by almost 30 percentage points between the NLSY79 and NLSY97 samples. The bulk of the growth is through starting college at a two‐year institution. This is the case throughout the test score and family income distributions. In contrast, the percentage of college attendees who earn a bachelor’s degree six years after high school completion is unchanged between the two cohorts (at about 37 percent), with an increase for women and a decrease for men.

Male Prime‐aged Nonworkers: Evidence from the NLSY97

Donna S. Rothstein
,
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Abstract

A number of recent papers document and try to explain the decline in labor force participation of prime age men over time (e.g. Coglianese, 2017, and Krueger, 2017). This paper uses longitudinal data to examine whether men’s prior trajectories of schooling, work, family, income, assets, health, incarceration, and living situations differ between nonworkers and their working peers. It also investigates whether non‐work status is a transitory state, and whether parents, spouses, partners, or others are providing. The data in this paper are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), which contains detailed histories about individuals’ lives across multiple domains. This allows one to drill down past top‐level information about employment and schooling to create a more nuanced picture involving support systems, criminal behaviors, family formation, health, disability, and youth expectations regarding educational attainment and future employment. At the 2015‐16 NLSY97 survey date about 10 percent of men, who range in age from 30 to 36, had not worked in the prior year, and 8 percent of men had not worked in the prior two years. Most of these men had never married, about a third lived in a household with a parent, and almost 20 percent were incarcerated at the time of the interview. On average, these men had about 4 years of labor market experience, suggesting some attachment to the labor market in prior years.

Regional Differences in the Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality: Evidence from the NLSY

Dan Black
,
University of Chicago and NORC
Seth Sanders
,
Duke University and NORC
Lynne Steuerle Schofield
,
Swarthmore College
Lowell Taylor
,
Carnegie Mellon University and NORC

Abstract

In a series of important papers (e.g., Chetty et al., 2014, and Chetty et al., forthcoming), Raj Chetty and coauthors show that there is substantial variation in the geography of intergenerational mobility; children born to parents with moderate income are more upwardly mobile in some places than in others. Chetty and Hendren ascribe a casual role to place‐based factors. In this paper we seek to understand the mechanisms behind this phenomenon by studying intergenerational links in cognitive and non‐cognitive ability—using data elements from mothers in the NLSY79 and their children in the NLSY79‐Child. There are two innovations in our study. First, in analyzing parent‐child links in cognition, we use item response level data collected for the purpose of constructing latent variables (the AFQT, PIAT, etc.), as in Junker et al. (2015). Second, we employ restricted‐use data elements to identify geography, matched to statistics constructed from Census data, and from the data files posted by the “Equality of Opportunity Project” team (Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and colleagues). The goal is to see if the place‐based upward mobility documented in the work in Chetty and coauthors is driven in part by improved “upward mobility” across generations in cognitive and non‐cognitive ability.
JEL Classifications
  • J0 - General