Using the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY), this article examines the influence of a region's industrial composition on the educational attainment of children raised by parents who do not have college degrees. The NLSY's geo-coded panel allows for precise measurements of the local industries that shaped the parents' employment…

This paper documents the emerging role of education in the well-known decline in US male working hours. An insignificant hours difference between high school and college graduates becomes a significant 2 hours/week advantage for college graduates within a generation. This growing "college hours premium" is confirmed in alternate data.…

Using US data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and following propensity score matching analysis, the study demonstrates that church attendance during youth has significant positive effects on an individual's psychological capital endowments in the form of self-esteem, positive attitude and self-satisfaction during adulthood. Since a…

What are the economic consequences of college noncompletion? Given escalating student debt, is "some college" still worth it? This article applies augmented inverse probability weighting to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to estimate the causal effect of college noncompletion on income and financial hardship. Although…

Undergraduate college-going is now undertaken well into adulthood, but knowledge about what leads individuals to enroll derives nearly entirely from the study of the "traditionally-aged". I examine whether and how predictors of enrollment vary as individuals progress through the life-course using nationally representative data from the…

We introduce a new approach to measuring the match between education and occupation by using the number of college courses related to one's occupation. Previous studies have only considered the match between college 'major' and occupation. That approach ignores the content of education and the courses taken in college. We find that taking courses…

The college-educated are more likely to vote than are those with less education. Prior research suggests that the effect of college attendance on voting operates directly, by increasing an individual's interest and engagement in politics through social networks or human capital accumulation. College may also increase voting indirectly by leading…

Using a sample of college graduates from the NLSY97, we introduce a new approach to assessing wage benefits of STEM training, STEM jobs, and the match between the two: rather than classify individuals dichotomously as STEM or non-STEM, we measure the STEM-intensities of both their college coursework and their occupational requirements. While the…

A long-standing consensus among sociologists holds that educational attainment has an equalizing effect that increases mobility by moderating other avenues of intergenerational status transmission. This study argues that the evidence supporting this consensus may be distorted by two problems: measurement error in parents' socioeconomic standing…

Vocational education is a large part of the high school curriculum, yet we have little understanding of what drives vocational enrollment or whether these courses help or harm early careers. To address this deficiency, we develop a framework for curriculum choice, taking into account ability and preferences for academic and vocational work. We…

Though the diversification of pathways through higher education is widely recognized, little is known about longer-term patterns of undergraduate participation and attainment. I used sequence analysis to examine college-going across early and middle adulthood in nationally-representative data. Clustering of sequence data revealed four latent…

Colleges offer remedial coursework to help students enrolling in post-secondary education who are not adequately prepared to succeed in college-level courses. Despite the prevalence of remediation, previous research presents contradictory findings regarding its short- and long-term effects. This paper uses a doubly robust inverse probability…

This study examines the impact of fluctuations in the unemployment rate before high school graduation on educational attainment measured 30 years later. I find evidence that important heterogeneity is masked by estimating average effects across the ability distribution. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this analysis…

The aims of the current study are twofold. First, we examine the relationship between specific modalities of career interventions and initial employment in IT. Specifically, we take a skills and social learning perspective to distinguish between direct and vicarious experiences of career interventions and relate these experiences to IT…

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1979, this article examines the relationship between adolescents' educational and occupational expectations, and how they correspond to their subsequent labor market outcomes in adulthood. We show that over-aligned adolescents, those who expect to obtain more education than is necessary…