March 15, 2022

For young adults who don’t have a college degree, the career-oriented courses they took in high school give them a leg up in the job market. But do the benefits of higher-quality employment after high school continue into middle age?

The first known U.S. study to examine the long-term impact of high school curricula finds that career and technical classes produce workers who, even though they didn’t attend college, are employed at age 50 – even better if they also took Algebra 2 and other college-prep math courses.

To target the students who prepared themselves for better-paying jobs, the courses the researcher counted as career-oriented were business and marketing, health care, agriculture, and computer programming. Amanda Bosky at the University of Wisconsin excluded courses that tracked students into low-wage work like food service and childcare.

Career and technical courses improved the labor market standing of men and women, with subtle differences. For the women, the more career courses they took in high school, the more likely they were to be employed at age 50. The benefits held true regardless of the individual’s innate characteristics, which usually play a role in career success – from scores on standardized math tests to parents’ income.

For 50-year-old men, any amount of career and technical training improved their odds of continued work, according to the analysis, which used a survey of 1982 high school graduates that checked in on them again decades later. The students’ transcripts, detailing their coursework, supplemented the survey.

Although Bosky didn’t examine the types of jobs the older workers were doing, her premise is that it’s better to be employed than not in the years before retiring.

The findings have another important implication. Understanding what it takes for high school graduates to be engaged in the labor force at 50 is crucial at a time secure union jobs are being eliminated and the demands of a technology-based economy have increased. …Learn More

December 21, 2021

Three months into the pandemic, a few million older workers had been laid off or quit. But what happened next?

The rapid drop in employment due to COVID gave the Center for Retirement Research an unusual opportunity to study the labor force decisions of baby boomers, who are within striking distance of retirement age but may or may not be ready to take the leap.

Traditionally, older workers who left a job tended to retire. But there was little indication that the people who stopped working during the pandemic saw retirement as their best fallback option.

This conclusion by the researchers is consistent with the pre-COVID trend of boomers working longer to put themselves in a better financial position when they eventually do retire. In fact, many older workers have returned to the labor force as the economy has rebounded and vaccines have become widely available.

But in April 2020, job departures spiked before settling back down at a new, much higher level. The annual pace of departures increased from 15 percent of workers 55 and over in 2019, prior to COVID, to 23 percent in 2020.

The researchers found a surprise when they looked at who stopped working. Although older people are vulnerable to becoming seriously ill from COVID, age wasn’t a big factor in their decisions. Boomers in their 60s were no more likely to leave their jobs than people in their mid- to late-50s, according to the analysis of monthly Census Bureau surveys.

The groups most likely to leave the labor force were women, Asian-Americans, and workers who either don’t have a college degree or don’t have a job that easily lends itself to working remotely.

But among all of the age 55-plus workers in the study, the share reporting that they had retired barely increased, from an average of 12 percent prior to COVID to 13 percent last year.

The only people who left their jobs and retired in significant numbers during the pandemic were over 70. This finding reinforced what the researchers found in data from the U.S. Social Security Administration: the pandemic didn’t have a major impact on retirement because the share of workers between 62 and 70 who signed up for Social Security was relatively flat between April 2019 and June 2021. …Learn More

August 19, 2021

In the madcap 1960 movie, “Where the Boys Are,” a college student named Tuggle (played by Paula Prentiss) is forthright about why she’s going to Ft. Lauderdale for spring break: to find a husband.

Women have come a long way, and two out of three married women today choose to work, rather than go Tuggle’s presumed route and become a full-time housewife. Yet there’s a 21^st century corollary to Tuggle’s experience. College is important in determining who people marry.

We tend to marry others who are like us, and education has become central to this. College graduates gravitate to other college graduates. People who complete their formal education at high school graduation tend to marry other high school grads. Further, this trend of marrying someone with a similar education is growing over time.

“People are increasingly marrying other individuals with the same level of education,” says Boston College economist Geoffrey Sanzenbacher. Sanzenbacher and other economists say the growing trend of college graduates pairing off with other graduates has increased income inequality.

The importance of college goes much deeper. Among graduates, the specific college one attends is more important in determining who one marries than one’s field of interest or personal attributes like SAT scores or a parent’s income.

For example, graduates of a specific college are very likely to marry someone who went to that same institution – even if they are in different fields, according to a new research study that connected the data in Norway’s centralized college admissions system with marriage data. Or consider two graduates of the same law school. They have a good chance of getting married – not because they are both lawyers but because they attended the same school. …Learn More

Field Work

June 24, 2021

Women attend college at higher rates than men. Women’s labor force participation was also fairly steady prior to COVID, while men’s declined, and women continue to move into fields traditionally held by men.

Despite all this progress, women still earn much less than men.

Discrimination partly explains the pay gap, as does motherhood, which can interrupt the smooth progression in women’s careers at a critical time. But another explanation doesn’t get as much attention: women earn less because they’re not as confident as men about how much they can get and are more afraid of taking some risks in negotiations with employers.

In the 2018 and 2019 graduating classes at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, women started their job searches earlier and accepted employers’ offers more quickly, according to a new analysis of student surveys before graduation and after they’d landed a job.

Men, on the other hand, do take risks, extending the negotiation with employers to see how much they can secure or even rejecting a job in hopes that a better one comes along.

Prior to graduating, nearly two-thirds of the women in BU’s business school had accepted a job during their junior or senior years but only about half of the men had, the researchers found.

The male students also enter their pay negotiations with higher expectations of what they want to earn. Their optimism, verging on overconfidence, serves them well. Male graduates from the BU business school earned about $6,700 more, on average, than their female classmates.

Men’s natural advantages in two psychological attributes – optimism and a willingness to take risks – “play a non-trivial role in generating early career earnings gaps among the highly skilled,” the study concluded. …Learn More

Field Work

March 25, 2021

For half to two-thirds of the college loans made over the past decade, the former students owe more than they initially borrowed.

This is the result of a federal program that bases monthly student loan payments on the borrowers’ income if they aren’t earning enough to afford the standard payments. But the monthly payments in these much-needed Income Driven Repayment (IDR) plans are often less than is required to fully service the principal and interest on the loans. So instead of getting ahead, borrowers are perennially behind and never chip away at the balances.

People who go into the repayment plans are “trying to bail out a boat with a bucket that has a hole in it,” said Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a non-profit that gives free information and advice to people needing help with their loans.

Marshall Steinbaum, an economist with the University of Utah, estimates that at least half of all student loans might never be repaid, based on his back-of-the-envelope calculation. That share is also growing, he said in an email, because more and more former students are enrolling in IDR programs.

The inability to pay “is baked into the system,” Steinbaum wrote in The Appeal. …Learn More

September 22, 2020

When Millennials’ unemployment rate spiked during the Great Recession, millions of them alleviated their financial problems by moving in with their parents.

Now the coronavirus is chasing Generation Z back home.

Some 2.6 million adults, ages 18 to 29, who had been living on their own moved back home between February and July, the Pew Research Center reports. This pushed up the share of young adults living with one or both parents to 52 percent, which exceeds the rate reached during the Great Depression.

Pew’s analysis included some Millennials. But members of the younger Generation Z account for the vast majority – more than 2 million – of the young adults who’ve returned to the financial security of their parents’ homes this year. [This count does not include college students who came home and attended classes remotely after their schools shut down last spring.]

As was the case for Millennials, what sent Gen-Z back home was a sharp rise in their unemployment rate, Pew said. For example, the rate for people in their early 20s has more than doubled this year to 14.1 percent.

No age group escapes the impact of a recession. The current downturn is the second in a decade for baby boomers, who have faced these major setbacks just as they are trying to square away their finances for retirement.

Losing a job and financial independence as a young adult also has long-term consequences. … Learn More

Research

August 11, 2020

The X-rays look very similar for two 60-year-old women with arthritic knees.

But the less-educated woman has more severe pain than the person who graduated college.

A new study of men and women finds that the degree of knee-joint deterioration visible in an X-ray isn’t the primary reason one person experiences more knee pain than someone else. Instead, the overwhelming reason is knee strain caused by obesity and the toll taken by physically demanding jobs – both of which are more common among less-educated workers.

The researchers focused on knee arthritis, because musculoskeletal pain is one of the leading causes of Social Security benefit payments to people who develop a disability and can no longer work.

Understanding what’s behind the pain differences is important, because the need for workers in certain jobs requiring physical strength – home health aides, janitors, and construction workers are examples – is expected to increase in the future.

Given this growing demand and predictions of a continued rise in obesity, the researchers conclude that “pain is expected to contribute to an increase” over time in the percentage of the population who will be impaired by their pain.

The people in the study fell into three educational groups: a high school degree or less; some college; or a four-year college degree. The researchers also had information about their occupations, as well as several data sources that gauge the severity of their knee pain, including the ability to do things like walking a quarter of a mile.

Knee arthritis worsens with age. However, a surge in reports of severe knee pain came about a decade earlier for people with no more than a high school degree than the surge for college graduates. …Learn More