Strategies for Success: High School and Beyond

The majority of American adolescents today are extraordinarily ambitious. In contrast to previous generations, more of them aspire to become physicians, lawyers, and business managers; few would consider working as machinists, office assistants, or plumbers. Not only do most teenagers hold high occupational aspirations, but they also have high educational expectations. Most adolescents expect to graduate from college, and a surprisingly significant proportion of them expect to earn graduate degrees. Such ambitions are widely held by teenagers from all different types of families and ethnicities—rich, poor, Asian, black, Hispanic, and white. ¹ Although highly ambitious, many of these teenagers will not fulfill their expectations, not because they are unwilling to work hard for grades or believe that school is unimportant to their future lives, but because they lack important information that would help them form effective strategies for successfully navigating their educational experiences in high school and the transition process after graduation. This is particularly the case for teenagers whose families have limited economic and social resources. ²

Ambitions are an essential component of adolescents' development, for they can help teenagers chart a life course and provide direction for how and where to invest their time and efforts. Prior research clearly demonstrates that one important predictor of social mobility is how much schooling an adolescent expects to obtain. ³ Students who expect to attend college are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in postsecondary school than students with similar abilities and family background characteristics who expect to obtain only a high school diploma. Occupational aspirations are another component of ambition. When consistent with educational expectations, such aspirations demonstrate an adolescent's knowledge of the world of work and educational pathways to different occupations. Not knowing how much education is needed for a given occupation makes it difficult to construct realistic plans for reaching one's goals. Ambitions formed in adolescence can have lifelong significance, influencing career choices as well as future earnings.

Even though economists have differing opinions on the labor market needs for the twenty-first century, most agree that entry-level credentials for stable jobs paying more than the minimum wage will most likely continue to rise. ⁴ This is evident in the types of jobs now requiring postsecondary degrees. For example, to do police work in some major cities, the required credential has changed from a high school diploma to a college degree. While what the long-term earnings trajectories will be for young people who hold only a high school diploma is unclear, being able to support a family and maintain a reasonable life-style with only a high school degree seems unlikely, at least in the near future.

Teenagers appear savvy about the economic returns of entering the labor force with only a high school diploma. The jobs available to high school graduates tend to be low skill, low wage, and in the service sector, with limited possibilities for stable long-term employment. The ambitions of today's adolescents are, in part, a response to the lack of work opportunities and dire prospects awaiting young people who do not attend college. ⁵

Over the past twenty years the percentage of high school graduates who immediately began working full time instead of enrolling in postsecondary school has steadily declined. Young adults who do not enroll in college immediately after high school graduation are more likely to be male and minority—Hispanic, African American, or Asian American. The number of nonwhite students entering the labor market following high school graduation nearly doubled (from 14 to 27 percent) between 1980 and 2000. Despite widespread concerns about the academic performance of American high school students, analyses of longitudinal data indicate that students entering the labor force directly after graduation do not have lower cognitive skills than students in similar circumstances ten years ago. Instead, the most significant differences between those who...