The Transition to Work in the U.S.: Pathways to stable full-time employment in young adulthood

• In Event: 413 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Refereed Roundtable Session. Table 01. Culture and Organizations
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 13. Precarity

Abstract

The transition to work for young adults in the U.S. is understudied. Most recent scholarship studies the transition from school-to-work in European countries (Muller and Gangl 2003). I use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to study the transition to work for a nationally-representative sample of student in 7th though 12th grades in the United States in 1994-95. I move beyond the school-to-work literature’s focus on the transition to a worker’s first job post-education and analyze the transition to first stable employment, defined as 2 years of full-time employment in the same job. Young adults move jobs often in the U.S. and settling into the same job is a more substantively meaningful marker of life course transition and the start of a worker’s career. I model the time to stable employment by education pathway and the influence of demographic characteristics and family background. High school dropouts have the hardest time finding stable employment and so characteristics associated with disadvantage have the strongest effect. Education appears to have a leveling effect, as these characteristics matter less for workers with higher levels of education in predicting movement to stable employment.

Author

• Michael Schultz, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill