PREFACE

This report uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey--Youth to examine the dynamics of the labor market experiences of young people entering the labor market. We confirm the conventional wisdom that young people hold a large number of jobs. However, our analysis shows that, by their early twenties, most young people have entered stable employment, defined as a job that will last one, two, or even three years. While there may be problems with the skills of labor market entrants, most young people are successfully finding jobs that yield long-term employment relations. The experience of the average youth, however, hides important subgroup differences. The results suggest that efforts to improve the school-to-work transition need to focus on those specific groups who fare worst in their early labor market career--most notably, high school dropouts.

The work reported here was jointly funded by the National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California, Berkeley, and the RAND Institute on Education and Training. It should be of interest to researchers and policymakers who are concerned with the early labor market experiences of youth in the United States. Selected results from this research have been published separately as "Young Men and the Transition to Stable Employment," in The Monthly Labor Review, Volume 117, Number 8, August 1994, pp. 31-48. The article is also available as RAND Reprint RP-338.