Stratified patterns of adolescent employment and their relation to educational attainment

ABSTRACT

The study examines relations between adolescent employment and three aspects of higher education: beginning an undergraduate degree, completing the degree and type of institution (more prestigious university versus less prestigious college). Our research adds a new dimension to the concept of adolescent employment: the contribution of the adolescent’s earnings to household income. This dimension links the earnings of the adolescent, as reflected in his/her salary, with parental socioeconomic status, as reflected in family income. Analyzing administrative data from the Israel National Insurance Institute for the cohort of 1991, which includes information for ages 12–28 (2003–2019), we found that adolescent employment per se does not usually affect higher education attainment, but there is a negative relation between the adolescent’s income share and higher education, even after controlling for household income in early adolescence. Engaging in the debate on the consequences of employment during adolescence for later life outcomes, our study reveals that this depends on the centrality of the adolescent’s contribution to family income.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescent employment
• higher education
• household income
• adolescent earnings
• stratification
• gender

Acknowledgement

This article benefited from the support of the Israel Science Foundation (Grant number: 2334/19). We thank the Journal Of Youth Studies editors and reviewers for their enlightening comments and suggestions. We also thank Helene Hogri, our editor, for her important contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Socioeconomic status is a multidimensional concept that includes, among other things, several family resources – parental education, parental class (qualifications and skills that can be translated into income and other returns on the labor market) and parental status (social and cultural resources available to families, such as social networks and cultural tastes, that impact children’s educational opportunities) – as well as income and wealth measures (Blossfeld 2019). In the current study we focus on household income.

2 The PISA exam measures achievement in mathematics, science and reading among 15-year-olds in over 70 countries.

3 We followed our sample until age 28 owing to the common practice of beginning studies in the mid-twenties.

4 All numbers and percentages of persons in the sample refer to the last year, i.e., 2019.

5 In Israel, virtually all undergraduate degrees are completed in three years. We therefore assume that three years of study indicates completion of a degree. The majority of the 1991 cohort (77%) who started higher education had completed it by the age of 28.

6 The rationale for the selected ages is that 15 is the minimum age of legal employment in Israel; age 18 is considered adulthood; age 19 ensured that all individuals had finished high school; and age 28 was the last year for which data was available.

7 Employment rates are higher at age 17 than at 16 (25.3% and 13.7%, respectively). As a sensitivity test, we also examined all models at age 16. Results were similar, though they became non-significant in some models.

8 In light of the time-constant variables in the data, we also used panel regressions to estimate random effects. General trends regarding the variables of interest were similar (Appendices A-C).

9 The rate of those who were employed at ages 15–17 was 16.4% of the boys and 11.7% of the girls.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation: [grant number. 2334/19].