Collaborative Research: SBP: Socioeconomic Mobility of Young Adults Without College Degrees: Understanding Transition Between Jobs

A high-quality job paves the way for upward socioeconomic mobility for a young adult by providing more income and career progression opportunities. Unfortunately, many young adults without postsecondary degrees spin their wheels between low-wage jobs. This project examines factors less reliant on formal education that may facilitate or counteract changes in job quality among young adults without postsecondary degrees. This project provides insights to workers about personal actions they can take while searching for and adjusting to new jobs to improve job quality. For employers and managers, this project clarifies how job tasks and the work environment can facilitate worker development and reduce turnover costs. Findings further inform the design of programs aiming to support young workers moving into better-quality jobs, including programs serving youth from low-income families. This project advances knowledge by developing and testing models that explain how individual factors (e.g., socioeconomic mobility beliefs), family background (e.g., social class origin), and work and nonwork environmental factors (e.g., workplace practices and government programs) drive changes in job quality. The project team is collaborating with the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development and the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development to collect data and analyze administrative records. The project team is surveying workers aged 18-29 without postsecondary degrees and unemployed at the beginning of the study. Additional rounds of surveys are being fielded as participants search for and adjust to new job(s) over the course of one year. Survey responses are being paired with administrative records. This project extends understanding of the role of behavioral processes during job transitions in intra-generational socioeconomic mobility. This project also contributes to knowledge about the interplay between individual agency and contextual factors shaped by family, work organizations, and government agencies during transitions into early adulthood. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.