Starting Off on the Right Foot

Starting Off on the Right Foot
High School Career Academies Boost Earnings and Independence

It might be surprising to many, but today, only about one-fourth of Americans over age 18 have a college degree. Among young adults age 18-34, only 16 percent have a BA. Another 7 percent have an Associate’s degree.

As a nation, we do a very good job of instilling the value of college. We do less well in preparing our high schoolers (at home and in school) for the rigors of college. Go to nearly any high school today and you’ll find many students who see college in their future. However, the majority of those will be derailed along the way. Even among those who make it to a four-year college, only about one-half of those finish.

So what happens to those who don’t make it? In short, many flounder in low-wage jobs. Others sink. In 2000, 14 percent—3.7 million—of all young adults aged 18 to 24 were neither enrolled in school, employed, or in the military, nor had a high school degree or GED.

Young persons who flounder on the path to adulthood risk becoming disconnected from those “institutions” that shape our lives: work, school, and family. At-risk young adults who lack the credentials to land a decent job struggle to find employment, often giving up in discouragement. Without a job, they find it hard to start a family. Pretty soon, they are adrift.

But a new study by MDRC finds promise in high school career academies for preventing this drift. Career Academies are high school programs that, in addition to regular academics, offer students an option to specialize in a field, whether that be culinary arts, accounting, nursing, or others. Many high schools across the country offer these academies, right within the high school walls.

MDRC recently evaluated several career academies in a rigorous study that used the gold-standard of research designs, random assignment. Like drug trial studies, this study created a control group of students in the same high schools and compared them with those enrolled in the career academies on such things as average earnings after high school, intensity of work, and wages, higher education, single parenthood, marriage, and whether they were able to live on their own. The high schools were in pretty tough neighborhoods in inner cities. MDRC researchers followed students for eight years.

The results are pretty amazing.

Earnings for those who completed the program in a career academy earned about $2,100 ore per year than their classmates—or about $17,000 over eight years. Much of these earnings gains were driven by their ability to land secure jobs: they worked more months and longer hours each week than others. They also earned a higher hourly wage. And these earnings gains were not coming at the expense of post-high-school education or training. Those in career academies were just as likely to go on to some form of postsecondary school.

Young men—often most at risk for becoming disconnected—did particularly well. They earned about $30,000 more over eight years than their peers from the same high school.

These higher earnings and job stability may be one reason that more of those from career academies were also doing better on the home front. There is nothing like a solid wage and a steady job to make you feel secure in your future.

Eight years after high school, significantly more from career academies were married and fewer were single. More were custodial parents and fewer were single parents. And more were living independently from their parents.

Most social programs rarely see impacts this large.