The third strand of my research program
deals with youths' aspirations. It is important to remember that youths
are making important decisions about their future with the skills they
have during adolescence. Therefore, while the focus on academic outcomes
is critical, youths' aspirations should also receive substantial
attention. As a sociologist who studies social inequlity and youths'
transitions to adulthood, I was struck by the lack of research on the
substantial number of youth in recent cohorts who do not report any
occupational aspirations or report that they do not know what they "want
to be" when they grow up. Increasing numbers of young people are facing
uncertain combinations of education, training, and non-standard work
arrangements. In this context, uncertainty may be beneficial if it
leads to continued education, career development, and even enduring
partnerships. In contrast, uncertainty may be detrimental if it
involves prolonged education without the acquisition of a degree,
residential dependence, and frequent movement from job to job in the
secondary labor market. Furthermore, research suggests youths’
occupational plans are often based on little knowledge of job
requirements. Some scholars have raised concern that youths give
little thought to the steps and plans necessary to achieve their
educational and occupational goals. Therefore, my research seeks to
address the following questions: Does uncertainty in aspirations vary by
race? Is there a cost associated with uncertainty? Are aligned
ambitions during adolescence important for shaping and constructing
life paths and realizing long-term educational and occupational
goals?
Description
My work in this area has been in collaboration
with Jeremy Staff (Pennsylvania State University) and Ricardo Sabates
(University of Sussex in England). We have collaborated on a
series of studies on the implication of youths’ aspirations for their
labor market outcomes in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom
(U.K.). This collaboration emerged from the Young Scholars
Research Grant program for junior faculty funded by the Jacobs
Foundation. Thus far, two studies from this collaboration have been
accepted for publication in major peer-reviewed journals.
The first study from this strand of research
concerns the substantial proportion of adolescents in the U.S. that
lack clear occupational aspirations. This uncertainty may benefit
socioeconomic attainment if it signifies role exploration, characterized
by career development, continued education, and enduring partnerships.
By contrast, uncertainty may diminish attainment if it instead leads to
aimlessness, involving prolonged education without the acquisition of a
degree, residential dependence, and frequent job changes. In a study
published in Social Forces with Staff and Sabates (Read
Article), I address an important question: do uncertain career
aspirations at age 16 affect wage attainments ten years later? The
answer is yes. Using nationally representative data from a cohort of
young women and men, we find that approximately 10 percent of youth do
not know what job they want to hold in young adulthood. Girls and boys
who report uncertain occupational aspirations at age 16 have
significantly lower wages ten years later than youth with professional
aspirations. These associations are reduced when controls for academic
ability, school effort, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and
measures of educational attainment and family formation in young
adulthood are taken into account, but the effects of uncertain
aspirations remain strong and statistically significant. These results
support the view that uncertainty heightens the risk of labor-market
problems.
I also examine the link between adolescents’
aspirations and labor market outcomes in the England. There have
been significant changes in the youth labor market and in the
school-to-work trajectories of young people over the last three decades
in Britain. Shifting social and economic conditions resulted in
record rises in youth unemployment in the 1980s coupled with the
collapse of the traditional route of early school-leaving and rapid
entry into employment within the U.K. The transition to adulthood has
become more individualized, with educational attainment increasing in
its importance for shaping young people‘s life chances—something likely
to have impacted especially the poorest and lowest-achieving young
people. Researchers and policy makers within the U.K. have become
increasingly interested in issues of young people‘s occupational
aspirations, transitions to employment and the antecedents of NEET (not
in employment, education or training) status. However, little
research has examined the connection between early uncertainty or
misalignment in occupational aspirations and entry into NEET
status.
In a study published in Journal of Social
Policy, which is based at The London School of Economics and
Political Science (Read
Article), I examined whether young people who hold uncertain
occupational aspirations, or aspirations that exceed likely educational
attainment at age 16, are more likely to be NEET than those whose
aspirations are certain and aligned with their educational expectations
(Yates, Harris, Sabates, Staff 2010). The findings are relevant to the
debates on emerging adulthood and the youth labor market.
Although we have completed our commitment to the
junior scholars program at the Jacobs Foundation, I have several more
studies on the youth aspiration-labor market link in both the U.S. and
the U.K. that are at various stages of development with this group of
young scholars. This research partnership has resulted in invited
lectures at the University of Surrey, University of London, and the
University of Edinburgh and enabled me to make further inroads into
international research and to establish a presence in stratification
discourse beyond the U.S.