Perceived Local Job Prospects and School Connectedness in a Struggling Rural Economy: A Life-Course Perspective

Abstract

Late in first decade of the 2000s, the closing of pulp and paper mills in the rural northeastern United States contributed to economic decline in the region and to rising concerns about population decline due to out-migration among local emerging adults in search of occupational or educational opportunities. In this context, and drawing on a life-course framework, the present study used four waves of panel data from the population of 7th- and 11th-grade public school students in a rural northeastern U.S. county to explore whether the county unemployment rate was related to perceived local job prospects; school connectedness was related to subsequent perceived job prospects; and the effects of county unemployment and school connectedness on perceived local job prospects varied by age cohort. Initially, changes in respondents’ perceptions about local job prospects paralleled shifts in local unemployment similarly for both cohorts; yet after the older cohort respondents had completed high school, their perceived local job prospects fell sharply, while perceptions among the younger cohort respondents, who were still in high school, remained stable. Among the older cohort respondents only, school connectedness was associated with subsequent positive perceptions about local job prospects net of relevant controls. Same-age cohort comparisons, evaluated when each cohort was in 12th-grade, showed no differences in the short-term effects of school connectedness on perceived local job prospects, despite variations in the age-linked timing of the most dramatic rise in unemployment during the study. The results highlight the lasting importance of school connectedness for teens raised in struggling rural economies.

Notes

To promote anonymity, we refer to the rural county under study as “Rural County” here and throughout the article.

Further analyses showed no statistically significant differences between the longitudinal sample respondents and those who dropped out of the study with regard to out-migration intentions, personal agency, family attachment, stressful life events, self-esteem, depressed mood, or problem substance use; dropouts did show higher delinquency levels (p <.001).

Table 1 Timing of Measures for the Longitudinal and 12th-Grade Analyses

Given the small proportion of non-White respondents (6%) in the study population, we did not have the statistical power to examine effects for each non-White racial/ethnic category.