For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, education has been promoted as the solution to a variety of economic problems. In Horace Mann's efforts to institute publicly supported education in the 1830s, he described education as "not only a moral renovator and multiplier of intellectual power, but also the most prolific parent of material riches" (Mann, 1842/1971, p. 147). The movement for an explicitly vocational component to formal schooling during the period from 1890 to 1920 similarly justified education as a mechanism for "learning to earn" and a solution to problems of international competitiveness, poverty, and the integration of immigrants into the mainstream of society (Lazerson & Grubb, 1974). More recently, a barrage of commission reports--starting with A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education [NCEE], 1983), which called for education renewal as a way to restore "our unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technical innovation" (p. 5)--has promoted educational reform as the principal solution to declining productivity, our economic position in an increasingly competitive world, and domestic problems like poverty and inequality.
At the same time, the attention to education as a panacea--an imperfect panacea, as many have pointed out (Perkinson, 1977)--has often been hortatory, providing little evidence about why and how education should improve productivity, competitiveness, or individual well-being. Of course, the positive relationship between years of formal schooling and earnings (summarized, for example, in Leslie & Brinkman, 1988) has provided some evidence that increased schooling improves employment opportunities and by extension would improve overall productivity by moving individuals from low-wage, low-productivity employment into positions with higher productivity and wages. However, the details of this process--about the specific employment opportunities open to better-educated individuals, about the ways in which more formal education results in higher productivity--have often been missing. Part of our faith in education has been an unquestioned belief that the expansion of education or improvement in its quality will automatically lead to economic gains for both individuals and the economy.
In this report, we examine one part of the labor market in which the relationship between formal schooling and employment is poorly understood--what we call the sub-baccalaureate labor market. We define this labor market to include those who do not have baccalaureate degrees but have at least a high school diploma.[1] This group therefore includes those with a high school diploma but no further education or training plus a large, heterogeneous group with some postsecondary education, including those with certificates and associate degrees from community colleges and technical institutes, those with credentials (often simply certificates of completion) from proprietary schools, and those who have entered postsecondary institutions but have dropped out without completing any formal credentials. The group with "some college" includes individuals from those with a postsecondary course or two to those who have almost completed a B.A.
The occupations within the sub-baccalaureate labor market are neither the highly skilled positions which often (if not always) require a college or graduate degree nor are they the unskilled positions in which high school dropouts find themselves. These occupations, then--and the educational institutions like community colleges, technical institutes, area vocational schools, and proprietary schools that provide the education for these occupations--are betwixt and between, intermediate between the baccalaureate labor market with various requirements and characteristics and the unskilled labor market where education makes little difference. Of course, the extent and nature of the skills required varies substantially, and one purpose of this research is to clarify which skills are most important, where they are acquired, and what the role of formal education is in learning these skills.
Within the sub-baccalaureate labor market, we often emphasize the highly varied group with "some college" as distinct from those with a high school diploma only--and our interviews were expressly designed to examine this group. These individuals are more likely to have obtained some specialized job-specific skills through postsecondary education, while those with high school diplomas are likely to have few job-specific skills--especially as enrollments in secondary vocational programs have fallen (Clune, White, & Patterson, 1989) and the quality of these programs has become suspect. In addition, the postsecondary institutions which provide occupational education--community colleges, technical institutes, area vocational schools, and proprietary training schools--have all been expanding, yet little is known about the role they play in employment. Finally, from the perspective of individuals, the large number of high school graduates who are not bound directly for four-year colleges and the large number of "re-entry" students--those trying to switch occupations as a result of layoffs as well as women entering the workforce after raising children--usually make choices from a variety of postsecondary alternatives whose employment effects are unclear. For these individuals, then, clarifying the effects of various postsecondary alternatives would provide the information necessary to make rational decisions.
Of course, the boundaries of this labor market are somewhat fuzzy since some individuals with baccalaureate degrees can be found working alongside those without this credential and others with considerable amounts of college can be found in unskilled positions otherwise filled by high school dropouts. However, as we will analyze in this report, the sub-baccalaureate labor market operates in distinctly different ways from the market for individuals with baccalaureate and graduate degrees. It is also quite different from the market for unskilled employment which high school dropouts enter since the middle-skilled occupations we examined almost universally are closed to individuals without a high school diploma.
This report therefore examines sub-baccalaureate labor markets in order to add to our understanding of this underexamined segment, not by the usual statistical analysis but by a qualitative approach involving interviews with providers of education and with employers who use that education. Partly because of prior knowledge that sub-baccalaureate labor markets are intensely local (Grubb & McDonnell, 1991), we selected four areas with various characteristics--that is, four local labor markets--to study. To make the interviews with providers and employers as concrete as possible, we focused on six occupations/occupational areas: electronics technician, machinist, drafter, accountant, business occupations, and computer-related occupations. Of course, this method has its own limitations since it is impossible to be comprehensive when using a time-intensive method based on interviews; this limitation is particularly troubling in examining a segment of the labor market as varied as the sub-baccalaureate market, with substantial differences among local areas, among specific occupations, and among employers. Still, this approach provides considerable detail about the ways in which providers of education prepare their students for employment and their perceptions of employment opportunities and about the hiring and promotion practices of employers and their perceptions of education providers--and, of course, about the congruences and disjunctures between these two sides of the market. It therefore leads to a richer picture of how these labor markets operate and, in the concluding section of this report, to recommendations designed to improve the operations of sub-baccalaureate labor markets.
[1] We have sometimes referred to this group as the middle-skilled labor market. We dislike the pejorative tone of the "sub-baccalaureate" phrase, especially since many individuals in community colleges are intent on completing baccalaureate degrees; but the term "middle-skilled" has very little meaning for most people. A more substantive question is whether dividing the labor market by levels of education is a useful exercise, compared to the categories of primary and secondary labor markets used in segmented labor market theories. In practice, there is substantial overlap among the ways of categorizing the labor market: Most independent primary sector positions require a baccalaureate or higher degree; most dependent secondary jobs are in the sub-baccalaureate labor market; secondary jobs are likely to be filled by people without a high school diplomas, with a few being filled by those with high school diplomas.