School-to-Work Transition Pathways of Rural Youth in China

• In Event: 4367 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 6. Life Course and Stratification

Abstract

Youth’s transition pathways into adulthood are important to study given that they closely relate to many late-life outcomes. However, limited scholarly attention is paid in investigating youth’s transition pathways in multiple domains of life from a rural, non-western context. This paper has two objectives. The first is to describe transition pathways in education, work and home-leaving among a group of rural youth residing in one of China’s most impoverished provinces– Gansu Province. The second objective is to provide a critical documentation on the roles that structural and agentic resources play in shaping rural youth’s pathways into adulthood. Data came from Wave 1 (2000) and Wave 4 (2009) of the Gansu Survey of Children and Family (GSCF). This study first uses latent class analysis (LCA) to characterize youths’ diverse transition pathways patterns from age 12-19. Multinomial logit model is then applied to investigate agentic and structural resources that associated with different patterns of transition pathways. LCA analysis revealed six latent pathways: (1) vocational school attenders; (2) local high school attenders; (3) move for high school; (4) move for work; (5) late middle school finishers and move for work; and (6) late middle school finishers and local high school. Multinomial analysis further distinguishes three sets of variables among these groups: youths’ agentic orientations, family SES, and community-level educational resources.This study highlights heterogeneous pathways experienced by rural Gansu youth in transition into adulthood. It also underscores the role that structural and agentic resources play in shaping youths’ transition pathways into adulthood.

Author

• Donghui Wang, Princeton University