Success in the Making: Life Course Patterns of Urban Youth Through the Third Decade

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

SES- 0241780 Alexander, Karl Johns Hopkins University This project is a continutation of the two-decades long Beginning School Study's (BSS) panel of urban youth at age 28 that examines the group's mature adult standing in three key life domains (education since high school, workplace experience, and mental health status). The BSS has been monitoring the educational progress and personal development of a representative, random sample of approximately 800 local public school children in Baltimore, Maryland, starting when they began first grade in fall 1982. Data have been collected on the children's experience at present extends though the years immediately after high school, to ages 22-23. These data have supported research on high school completion, college entry, and early work experience, but the transition to adulthood has lengthened in the modern era, and typically much remains unsettled in the early 20's. The current study, the Mature Adult Survey at ages 27-28, provides a more definitive accounting of the group's adult life circumstances and trajectories, supporting studies of postsecondary program completion (including vocational training), career success, criminal persistence and desistance, family relationships, and health status toward the end of the third decade of life. These data will enhanced BSS longitudinal data and allow researchers to address questions about life outcomes in adulthood relative to formative experiences over middle childhood and adolescence. The dataset will be archived in the social science data library at Harvard's Murray Research Center, making this valuable data resource available to the wider scientific community. The project's objective is to identify sources of resilience in the lives of disadvantaged urban youth that enable many of them to overcome poverty and other handicapping conditions to finish school or training programs, find their way to steady work with good prospects, enter into satisfying and stable relationships, avoid debilitating substance abuse, stay out of trouble with the law, and attain a sense of personal satisfaction as their lives have unfolded. The project's broader contributions include the involvement of underrepresented minority and low-income youth as study participants, its interdisciplinary leadership team, archiving of the project data for use by the broader scientific community, and its potential for improving the life prospects of disadvantaged youth. Previous BSS research on summer learning, grade retention, and educational tracking, widely disseminated in professional circles as well as through popular media, has informed several areas of education policy. Study findings can potentially contribute to the development of so-called "soft" workplace skills, the later life consequences of part-time high school employment for the non-college bound, resources that help high school dropouts avail themselves of "second chance opportunities" to finish high school, and the patterning across social lines of differential access to postsecondary education.