Youth employment during school: results from two longitudinal surveys; students who worked 20 or fewer hours per week during the school year were more likely to attend college; youths who worked a greater percentage of weeks during the school year worked more consistently when they reached ages 18 to 30

Monthly Labor Review, August, 2001 by Donna S. Rothstein

Notes

(1) See Christopher J. Ruhm, "Is High School Employment Consumption or Investment?" Journal of Labor Economics, October 1997, pp. 735-76; and National Research Council, Protecting Youth at Work (Washington, National Academy Press, 1998), for extensive reviews of the literature on the impact of youth employment. In general, the literature shows mixed results regarding whether youth employment affects academic outcomes. It does, however, generally suggest that working while enrolled in school positively affects subsequent labor market outcomes.

(2) Gerald S. Oettinger, "Does High School Employment Affect High School Academic Performance?" Industrial and Labor Relations Review, October 1999, pp. 136-51.

(3) Audrey Light, "High School Employment, High School Curriculum, and Post-school Wages," Economics of Education Review, June 1999, pp. 291-309.

(4) Ruhm, "Is High School Employment Consumption or Investment?"

(5) The years 1979 and 1997 both saw an upturn in the economy. Economic expansion peaked in 1979, just prior to the 1980 recession. Another strong economic expansion had 1997 in its midst. Note that, subsequent to the release of round-1 NLSY97 data, some duplicate observations were discovered. The NLSY97 round-1 sample size then fell from 9,022 to 8,984. Sample weights at the time this article was begun were based on all 9,022 observations, and tabulations in the article use the full round-1 sample. Also, tabulations based on data in both surveys use round-1 sampling weights, thereby ensuring that the data are nationally representative of each youth cohort.

(6) Most youths surveyed in the NLSY97 had not yet turned 17, so their employment is not examined. Both the NLSY79 and the NLSY97 contain detailed, week-by-week employment histories. However, these are available for the younger NLSY79 respondents only from age 16 forward and for the NLSY97 respondents only from age 14 forward. At this point, there is not much age overlap in the histories across the two surveys. However, the next section uses the employment histories in the NLSY79 solely to examine the relationship between youth employment and long-term outcomes.

(7) Mark Schoenhals, Marta Tienda, and Barbara Schneider, "The Educational and Personal Consequences of Adolescent Employment," Social Forces, December 1998, pp. 723-62, provide a brief summary of the literature on the subject.

(8) Family structure is defined as five mutually exclusive categories: (1) families with two biological parents or two adoptive parents (called, for simplicity, two-biological-parent families), (2) families with one biological parent and one step- or adoptive parent (called simply two-parent families), (3) families with one female biological parent and no other parent (female-parent families), (4) families with one male biological parent and no other parent (male-parent families), and (5) families consisting of children living with foster parents, grandparents and no parents, or other relatives and no parents; families of children living in group quarters; and other family arrangements (all lumped together as children not living with parents). Due to the small sample size of male-parent families, the tables that follow exclude that category.