| Stefanie DeLuca
Johns Hopkins University
The decision not to attend college: School, work, and opportunities in the lives of contemporary high school graduates
FINAL REPORT:
Not Making the Transition to College: School, Work, and Opportunities in the Lives of Contemporary High School Graduates.
Stefanie DeLuca and Robert Bozick.
In this paper we analyze the motives for not attending college among a nationally representative sample of high school graduates in 2004 who had not enrolled in college by the spring of 2006 (N = 2,600). We use a latent class modeling approach to identify five classes of non-enrollees: those who are oriented toward work that does not require a college degree (18.5 percent), those who cannot afford college and/or need to support their families (28.6 percent), those who face multiple disadvantages (6.7 percent), those who do not enroll for other reasons (43.8 percent), and those who join the armed forces (2.4 percent). Adopting a social agency perspective that highlights individual decision making, we test the hypothesis that the motives of these youth are guided by their orientations toward school, their orientations toward work, the college-going ethos of their high schools, and their local labor market opportunities. We find that the sharpest contrasts are between work-driven non-enrollees and economically-constrained non-enrollees. While in high school, work-driven non-enrollees hold paid jobs, expect to hold a blue collar job at age 30, and live in areas where the demand for college-educated labor is relatively low. Economically-constrained non-enrollees, on the other hand, are more likely to be oriented toward school and to expect white collar careers. Whereas most research on college enrollment emphasizes structural constraints and assumes that all youth want attend college, our findings suggest heterogeneity in the motives of non-enrolled; motives that are partly driven by their orientations toward work and their local labor market opportunities.
Back to Funded Research Grants Page |