This study has used the National Longitudinal Survey--Youth to reexamine the school-to-work transition among young U.S. men and women in the 1980s. We confirm the results documented in previous research: A large share of young males are neither in school nor working full time after leaving school, especially those who leave school prior to obtaining any post-secondary education. In addition, in the years shortly after leaving school, these young men hold many jobs. Broadly similar patterns hold for women, although their activity status and job-holding patterns are affected by childbearing and childrearing.

From this static analysis of work-history "snapshots," we proceeded to dynamic analyses of the transitions to stable employment. We used a different and, we argue, preferable measure from that used previously. As a result, we find less support for the common perception that the typical high school graduate mills about in the labor market until well into his twenties. By age 19, the typical male high school graduate (measured as the male at the median of the job-duration distribution) has already entered a job that will last at least a year. The corresponding ages for entering jobs that last two or more and three or more years are 20 and 22. For young male high school graduates who do not return to school, the time to reach these job-tenure points occurs a few months to one year earlier. These results suggest that the median high school graduate does not move immediately from school to a long-term job. However, he will enter a long-term job (lasting at least two or three years) in his early twenties--not the mid- or late twenties claimed by some other analysts. Thus, for the median student, the transition to more stable employment does not appear to be a major problem. These longer-tenure jobs may be "dead-end" by some other criteria (absolute earnings, earnings growth), but not by their longevity.

There is, however, considerable diversity with the school-leaving groups we examined. The above characterization holds for the male high school graduate at the middle of the job-duration distribution. This means that half of the men in this school-leaving group achieve stable employment at an even faster pace, and the other half proceeds more slowly. For instance, male high school graduates at the 75th percentile do not reach a 1-, 2-, or 3-year-tenure job until the ages of 20, 23, and 25; those at the 25th percentile attain these milestones two, five, and six years earlier, respectively. For high school dropouts, the time to reach this status is even longer. Among men, blacks and, often, Hispanics within any given school-leaving group also make the transition to stable employment more slowly. These results suggest that while "milling about" is less characteristic of the experience of the typical high school graduate, it is a more accurate description of the early labor market career for most high school dropouts, especially minority men.

We further document that the proportion of young people who could be considered milling about is sensitive to the concept of job duration used. Our concept--ever having held a job lasting M years--presents a more favorable view of the transition than analyses based on whether the current job will last M years, or whether the current job has already lasted M years. Nevertheless, we believe that our concept is the most natural one, because it is based on the experience of ever holding a job for a given tenure. We are inclined to believe that whether a current job has lasted or will last that long is of less importance: Job turnover, according to standard search models, follows from the process of trying out different jobs, thereby producing better matches between an individual's skills and the needs of the employer.

The bulk of the analysis is based on school-to-work experiences of the cohort of youth surveyed in the NLS-Y, a group that entered the labor market in the early 1980s. An analysis of data from the Current Population Survey reveals that the experiences of young men in the NLS-Y cohort were similar to the experiences of young men who entered the labor market in the 1970s through the early 1990s. The stability of both static and dynamic measures of early labor market experience based on the CPS is most evident for youth with at least a high school degree.

High school dropouts, by comparison, appear to have faced a more difficult transition into the labor market in the early 1990s than in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Compared with earlier cohorts, young dropouts today are increasingly less likely to be working full time and more likely to be neither working nor in school. At the same time, the job-tenure distribution for these less educated youth appears to have worsened through the 1970s and 1980s; the largest effect is most apparent at older ages and longer-tenure points. These results imply that our NLS-Y-based characterization of the transition to stable employment for high school dropouts is probably too pessimistic for the early 1970s and too optimistic for the early 1990s.

From a policy perspective, these results cast doubt on some of the current school-to-work initiatives. For most high school graduates, stable employment as defined in this analysis is attained relatively quickly (by the early twenties). Thus, programs to encourage the transition to longer-tenure jobs may be based on an erroneous view of the school-to-work transition experience of most (but not all) high school graduates. At the same time, our analysis indicates that youth who leave school before completing a high school degree take considerably more time to achieve longer tenure with a given employer. Finally, these results cast doubt on the suggestion that employers may be reluctant to provide training to young workers because they are concerned that young workers will leave before the firm recovers the cost of training. At least among high school graduates and those who enter the labor market with additional post-secondary schooling, there is evidence of stable employment early in the labor market career.