Adolescent and youth transitions: school and work

Education is a vital component of the preparation for adulthood, and is closely linked to transitions into marriage and parenting. Childbearing among adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa remains high, while primary school completion is far from universal. This paper uses longitudinal data from five rounds of the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study to investigate how becoming pregnant while attending school influences medium-term educational outcomes of young women. Employing multiple strategies to overcome potential endogeneity between pregnancy and education, we estimate the effect of pregnancy on enrollment, grade attainment, literacy, and numeracy. Preliminary results show that pregnancy is commonly cited as a reason for not attending school, and that girls who miss one or more school terms due to pregnancy are less likely to re-enroll than their counterparts who drop out for other reasons. However, girls who leave school due to pregnancy do not appear to be a selective group of sexually active girls with respect either to ability and aspirations or to background characteristics. This suggests that enabling girls to postpone family formation at least until after the completion of schooling could significantly improve the education trajectories of those who otherwise would have had to interrupt or abandon their studies.

The return to school is an important part of academic trajectories in more economically advanced societies where it often serves as a strategy for skill enhancement and socioeconomic advancement. Very little is known about this phenomenon in Mexico even though many youth and young adults return to school after beginning their working lives.
The objective of this article is to describe trends in the return to school across three cohorts of Mexican men and women and to identify the factors that are associated with return to school. We use human capital and life course theory to generate hypotheses regarding the determinants of the return to school.
The results show that factors positively associated with the return to school in this population included having secondary schooling or more, being unmarried, having lived in an urban area one year before, having parents in nonmanual or professional occupations, and belonging to younger cohorts. In contrast, age had a negative association with return to school.
Men and women had similar risk to return to their studies, but we find that women belonging to oldest cohort and women without employment experience one year before were less likely to return to school than their male counterparts.

We examine the work history and transition to adulthood among early school leavers. We use retrospective data from a sub-sample of young adults (20-34) residing in Greater Jakarta who ever dropped out of school at age 16 or below (N=799). It is commonly assumed that early school leavers would spend the rest of their formative years working as a child labourer. However, our sequence analysis of the work and education history of early school leavers reveals this is not always the case. Less than a quarter of early school leavers worked in the immediate year following school exit. In contrast, about 30 per cent spent neither worked nor studied between the ages 12-18. Upon identifying that that a small number of respondents eventually managed to return to school, we found that father’s education and sex were the main predictors of school re-entry. Among those with early work experience, the top three occupations were workers in the processing/manufacturing industry, domestic servants/babysitters, and as informal traders. Finally, we found that early school leavers progressed faster into leaving parental home, marriage and parenthood relative to those who left school at ages 17-19.

This paper investigates the role that childbearing plays in the failure of teenage girls to complete their schooling in South Africa. Of women aged 20-34, only 33% who gave birth as teenagers had matriculated from Grade 12, compared to 57% of other women. The paper analysed nationally-representative panel data from the National Income Dynamics Study. It focuses on 671 young women aged 15-18 in 2008 who were re-contacted in 2010. Girls’ risk of becoming a mother during these two years was largely unrelated to their home circumstances. Only girls from households in the top 20% of the income distribution were less likely to give birth. What was more important was whether they were already 1+ grades behind at school. While having a baby usually halts girls’ schooling, girls who became mothers were already relatively unlikely to pass the matriculation exam. Moreover, although their socioeconomic background affects the attainment of younger girls, it is unimportant in this age group Thus, even though teenage childbearing limits young women’s life chances in South Africa, it appears to play a limited role in the reproduction of social disadvantage. However, one cannot infer that secondary schooling in South Africa is meritocratic: Lam et al. propose the more depressing conclusion that school attainment is no more than a lottery.

Young people in the 21st century face the transition to adulthood in a very different way with respect to those of the same age in the 1980s. There are also wide differences across countries in the Western world. In this work we analyze the trends in the proportion of young adults working full-time, who achieved some sort of financial independence, and their living arrangements. Using the Luxemburg Income Study we look at six different countries – United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Netherlands – to give a cross-national comparison, and we compare outcomes in two points in time – mid-1980s and 2004 – to have an idea about the evolution of young adults’ behavior over decades. We find a general decreasing trend in the percentage working full-time, and earning a satisfactory level of wages. The situation is more positive for women, who are more active in the labor force in 2004 than in the mid-1980s, suggesting that males and females’ careers become more similar over time. In addition, there are differences across countries that cannot be entirely explained by structural factors and differences in labor markets, and that may be related to other aspects, like cultural and normative shifts.