Improving School-to-Work Transitions

Chapter 4. Do School-to-Work Programs Help the “Forgotten Half”?

Chapter 4 Do School-to-Work Programs Help the “Forgotten Half”? David Neumark and Donna Rothstein THE 1994 FEDERAL School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) provided around $1.5 billion to support increased careerpreparation activities in the country’s public schools.1 The STWOA was spurred by a concern that youth labor markets in the United States entailed unnecessary periods of joblessness, excessive job instability, and employment in dead-end jobs (U.S. General Accounting Office 1990). The act aimed to help young people develop the skills needed in the workforce and make better connections to careers through school-to-career transition systems, which fostered partnerships among schools, employers, and others (U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment 1995). The “findings” on which the STWOA was based referred specifically to the problems that disadvantaged and minority youths face in making the school-to-work transition.2 Furthermore, school-towork practitioners commonly argue that school-to-work programs, policies, and institutions are particularly helpful for less-advantaged youths, or the broader group of those who in the absence of any intervention are unlikely to go on to college—often termed the “forgotten half.”3 The main goal of this paper is to use the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) to examine evidence on the effectiveness of school-to-work efforts for the forgotten half— namely, those less likely, ex ante, to attend college. It is important to 87 emphasize that the school-to-work programs covered in the NLSY97 reflect many of the types of programs that the STWOA encouraged, but that the NLSY97 was not designed specifically to evaluate the STWOA. Thus, while there is overlap in programs, there are surely cases of schools that were engaged in related school-to-work efforts prior to the STWOA, as well as schools that did not receive STWOA funds yet ran related school-to-work programs during the period in which the STWOA was in effect.4 Thus, we are evaluating the effects of a variety of school-to-work programs, not the STWOA itself. The actual language of the STWOA discussed three approaches to school-to-work (hereafter, STW): work-based learning, schoolbased learning focusing on careers, and connecting activities between the two types of learning.5 The specific STW programs covered in the NLSY97 include job shadowing; mentoring (matching students to an individual in an occupation); cooperative education (combining academic and vocational studies);6 work in a schoolsponsored enterprise;7 Tech Prep (a planned program of study with a defined career focus); and internships or apprenticeships.8 Among those programs that can be interpreted as work-based learning are job shadowing, cooperative education, work in a school-based enterprise,9 and internships and apprenticeships. Mentoring ideally is also work-based, but may not necessarily involve work. Job shadowing and mentoring are most likely considerably less intensive than these other programs (Neumark and Joyce 2001). Tech Prep is probably best classified as school-based learning, since it is a curricular arrangement rather than a program based in the workplace.10 Our analysis proceeds in two straightforward steps. First, to operationalize the “forgotten half” we estimate a reduced form model for attending college. We do this without incorporating information on STW participation, to establish the ex ante probabilities of college attendance. We use the estimates of this model to distinguish between those in the top half and those in the bottom half of the distribution of the predicted probability of college attendance, and interpret the latter as the “forgotten half.” We then estimate regression models for the effects of participation in various STW programs on a number of postsecondary-education- and employmentrelated outcomes, allowing for separate effects of STW program participation for those in the top and bottom half of the predicted probability of college attendance—in other words, we estimate 88 Improving School-to-Work Transitions separate effects for the forgotten half. These estimates are then used to test which types of STW programs boost postsecondary outcomes , and which do this particularly for the forgotten half. The NLSY97 provides researchers with the best opportunity available to date to study the impact of STW, as it covers participation in many types of STW programs and, with the data now available, begins to capture postsecondary educational and labormarket outcomes. Still, the goal of STW, “better career decision making” among young men and...