Overview

There is a substantial and growing research literature on credentials for young adults, driven by an increasing recognition of their importance in fostering successful transitions from education to the workforce. Key areas of study within this field have focused extensively on apprenticeships, examining their design, implementation, and effectiveness across diverse industries. Furthermore, a significant body of research investigates the critical role of support services young adults need to succeed in their educational and career journeys, encompassing everything from academic advising and financial aid to mentorship and socio-emotional development. Finally, researchers are actively exploring the nuanced impacts of different credentialing programs on various young adult populations, considering factors such as socioeconomic status, prior educational attainment, and career aspirations, in order to identify equitable and effective pathways to upward mobility.

Examples

♦ The Uncertain Pathway from Youth to a Good Job by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (2022): Over the past several decades, the pathway to a good job has become longer and more challenging for young adults. Today, most young workers do not attain a good job until their early 30s, and only young workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher are consistently more likely than those in the previous generation to have a good job before age 30. Further, the disparities in good jobs by race/ethnicity and gender persist. To secure a good job, young adults need more education and high-quality work experience than was necessary for previous generations. But three hurdles stand in their way: the rising cost of postsecondary education, limited access to high-quality work-based learning, and the absence of comprehensive counseling and career navigation services.

Key findings from this research:

• It takes longer for young adults to attain a good job than in the past. A good job pays at least $35,000 per year and $57,000 at the median for young workers (ages 25-35) nationwide, with adjustments based on cost-of-living differences among states. Most young adults need more time today than to acquire the additional education and job experience needed to land a good job. However, by age 30, a greater share of today’s young adults have a good job compared to the previous generation.
• Postsecondary education and training have become crucial in gaining access to good jobs. Young adults generally need at least some postsecondary education and work experience to have a decent chance of getting a good job. Among older millennials in the labor force, 80 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher had a good job at age 35. This compares to 56 percent of those with some college or an associate degree, 42 percent of those with only a high school diploma, and 26 percent of those with less than a high school diploma.
• Daunting inequality persists in both education and labor markets. Persistent racial/ethnic equity gaps in educational attainment lay the groundwork for similar disparities in the likelihood of attaining a good job. Gender gaps also persist despite widespread generational changes in women’s educational attainment. And when race and gender disparities are combined, the gaps in the likelihood of having a good job are even more striking: At every education level, young women are less likely to have a good job than young men within the same racial/ethnic group. These disparities reflect labor market discrimination among equally educated workers.
• The elongated transition to good jobs has long-term financial consequences. The slow journey to good jobs has consequences for young people’s economic well-being. As a result of the longer transition to good jobs and higher educational debt, young adults today accumulate less wealth than the previous generation, with disparities in wealth by race/ethnicity and gender. In fact, young Black/African American women have less than $1,000 median net worth at all levels of education. The report offers seven recommendations for comprehensive reform:
  • Embrace our country’s diversity and reject racial/ethnic and gender injustice, in part by making  investments in culturally responsive teaching and counseling.
  • Apply an equity lens to all policy and programmatic reforms by measuring inequality and crafting policies and programs designed to address it.
  • Provide targeted, wraparound educational and social supports to young people from cradle to career, including universal pre-kindergarten and equitably funded public schools.
  • Invest in programs that treat education and labor markets as a single system extending from early childhood to the first good job, including those with strong employer involvement.
  • Help young people—especially those who are most marginalized by the education system—pursue and attain their education and career goals simultaneously, using career exposure and work-based learning.
  • Create a transparent, data-based education and career navigation system that is accountable for making outcomes more effective and equitable.
  • Make college more affordable and more convenient by investing in free college, incremental credentialing, community college baccalaureate programs, and better transfer pathways.

Related reports listed:

• How Limits to Educational Affordability, Work-Based Learning, and Career Counseling Impede Progress toward Good Jobs. This report explores how the pathway from youth to adult economic independence has changed across generations.
• How Racial and Gender Bias Impede Progress toward Good Jobs. This report examines persistent opportunity gaps among demographic groups.
• Executive Summary: The Effects of Race, Class, and Gender. This provides an overview of the economic and social landscape that young people face today.

♦ Youth Policy, How Can We Smooth the Rocky Pathway to Adulthood? by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (2021): The study finds that:

• Youth employment has declined during the past 20 years. By the end of 2019, youth (ages 16-21) were already 11% points less likely to be employed than in 2000, compared to a 1% point difference for prime-age adults (ages 25-54). During the pandemic, the youth employment rate declined by another 6% points, and the gap between youth employment and prime-age employment has widened by 9% points since 2000. Some of the decline in youth employment rates can be attributed to an increase in the share of youth enrolled in school or college, which was 59% in 2000 and has been over 65% since 2012.
• Black and Latino youth are much more likely to be disconnected from school and work than white youth. The overall share of youth who are disconnected—neither working nor enrolled in school—rose during the COVID-19 downturn, reaching 16 percent by March 2021 before dropping back to 14 percent by June 2021. The overall rate of disconnection from school and work hides major disparities by race and ethnicity: Black and Latino youth are substantially more likely to be neither working nor enrolled in school or college than were white youth.
• For young adults, more education is key to labor market success. Young adults (ages 22-27) with graduate and professional degrees have a higher employment-to-population ratio than similarly educated young adults had in 2000. All other groups of young adults have lower employment rates now than similarly educated young adults did in 2000.

♦ The United States Needs a Comprehensive Approach to Youth Policy by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (2021): These trends illustrate the urgent need for comprehensive reform of the youth policy landscape. Youth policy in the U.S. is a vast patchwork of programs, initiatives, and funding streams. It is fragmented across multiple institutional silos—including K-12 education; postsecondary education; federal, state, and local government entities; and private industry. This disjointed and fragmented approach to youth policy allows many young people to slip through the seams. Most youth programs in the U.S. are administered at the state and local levels, although many receive federal funding. Many programs have become more decentralized over the years. For example, youth employment and training policy traces its roots to the New Deal, but subsequent legislation has established more state and local control over youth employment and training programs. These programs also have suffered from decades of underinvestment. On the education front, federal legislation serves as an umbrella for many state and local policies and programs. Education policy is further fragmented into K-12 and postsecondary silos. An all-one-system approach to youth policy would support young people along the entire continuum of their journey from school to work. It would help them attain both postsecondary education and quality work experience to support their transitions from education to good jobs. In this modernized approach, preschools, elementary and secondary schools, community colleges, four-year universities, employers, and governments would all follow an integrated playbook, helping to smooth out young people’s path from pre-K to college and work. To transform youth policy, systemic reforms should incorporate the following:

• Universal access to publicly funded early-childhood education.
• Equitable funding for K-12 and postsecondary education.
• Career development starting in middle school.
• Improved availability and usability of data.
• Enhanced academic and career counseling.
• Vigorous commitment to equal opportunity regardless of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.
• Improved transfer policy.
• More flexible education and career pathways that ensure students receive credit for prior learning.

♦ The Current State of Diversity and Equity in U.S. Apprenticeships for Young People: What the Data Tell Us about Representation, Equity Gaps and Opportunity along Gender and Race/Ethnicity Lines (2022): The Jobs for the Future (JFF) Center for Apprenticeship and Work-based Learning analyzed a decade of data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Registered Apprenticeship Partners Information Database System (RAPIDS) to glean insights about the system’s youngest apprentices—ages 16-24. The authors disaggregated data by race/ethnicity and gender to better understand the challenges and opportunities among these groups. Specifically, how diverse is the population of young apprentices? Are they clustered in certain occupations? How do their exit wages compare to those of their peers? 

The research found that even though there has been a push on multiple fronts over the past five years to increase the number of high-quality apprenticeships for high school-age youth, those efforts haven’t yet made a dent in disparities of outcomes for this group. Although the number of young apprentices grew significantly between 2010 and 2020, the same inequities of access and outcomes, specifically exit wages, still exist for people of color and women of all backgrounds. The data indicate that occupational segregation of workers who aren’t white and female workers of all backgrounds is the primary reason for below-average exit wages (that is, these groups are overrepresented in occupations with the least amount of advancement potential).

The average hourly exit wage for youth apprentices of all genders and races/ethnicities was $31, which is significantly higher than the average wages for youth overall. Across race/ethnicity lines, the white youth hourly exit wage nearly equaled the average of $29.55, compared with $32 for Hispanic youth and $23 for Black youth. Looking at the data through a gender lens, however, shows that apprenticeships boost male wages significantly more than female wages. While male youth overall achieved an average 137% boost of earnings ($31: $13.08 per hour), this contrasts to a wage boost for female apprentices of only 42% ($18 for apprentices and $12.69 overall).

See Also

Success, Redefined: How Nondegree Pathways Empower Youth to Chart Their Own Course to Confidence, Employability, and Financial Freedom - Research Study

Federal Youth Apprentice Pathway Program (U.S. Department of Labor's ETA)

Credentials - Research | Topic Brief

Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) | Organization

Jobs for the Future | Organization