| Jenifer Hamil-Luker
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Differential participation in and returns to education over the life course
FINAL REPORT:
In an increasingly knowledge-intensive world, there is a growing recognition that education and learning cannot be confined to early stages in people's lives, but must be integrated throughout their life courses. Pressures of global competition, rapid technological change, and population aging heighten the role that adult learning and training play in individuals' and nation's social and economic well being. Echoing President Lyndon Johnson's proclamation that education is the answer for all our national problems, governments around the globe promote lifelong learning as a strategy to combat unemployment, reduce economic inequalities, lower crime rates, remedy racial prejudice, and spread democratic principles. Clearly, the demand for adult education is increasing; the necessity of advanced skill levels is escalating.
As technological change accelerates and foreign competition intensifies, concern over the creation and maintenance of labor force skills has never been higher among advanced economies. Knowledge, skills, educational and occupational credentials have become an increasingly important means of access to good jobs with adequate pay. From the early 1970s to the late 1990s, only those with a college education maintained the level of their inflation-adjusted earnings and only those with graduate degrees experienced a real increase in their standard of living. Over the next decade, occupational employment patterns are projected to reflect continued movement toward higher levels of required education and training. Between 1996 and 2006, high paying occupations are predicted to grow faster than low-paying ones. Long-term on-the-job training or an associate's degree or higher academic qualification will be increasingly needed to gain access to occupations that offer decent wages.
Because the distribution of learning opportunities is uneven, there is an increasing polarization between the knowledge-haves and the knowledge-have-nots. The high-skill and high-wage economy offers many opportunities for well-trained and educated employees, but places the undereducated and low-skilled workers in a precarious position. Thus, almost every economic and social policy analyst recommends improved education and training as one of the surest ways to combat stagnant wages and growing economic disparities. There is no guarantee, however, that equalizing skills and education credentials will equalize incomes. My dissertation explores this possibility by examining the extent to which adult education compensates for an earlier lack of education and training. I explore the extent to which participation in adult learning is unbalanced between men and women and between people of different age groups, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and social classes. Finally, I explore the long-term returns to investments in human capital over a thirty-year period.
The first part of my dissertation uses data from the 1991, 1995, and 1999 National Household Education Surveys to map how adult learning is distributed in the general US population. The NHES is one of the few nationally representative data sets that provide comprehensive information on adults' informal as well as formal educational experiences. Thus, I can examine trends in Americans[ participation in ESL classes, basic skills and GED preparation, college, vocational and technical training, apprenticeships, work training, and personal development courses, as well as their public library usage, community service activities, and frequency of reading newspapers, magazines, and books. I use descriptive statistics to survey the landscape of adult education over the 1990s, and then use logistic regression analyses to explore the demographic correlates of participation in, employer support for, and barriers to various forms of adult education. Because little empirical research explores education and training among older adults, I focus one chapter of my dissertation on later life learning.
I find that women, older adults, racial and ethnic minorities, and people with lower levels of initial education are less likely to participate in most forms of adult education. They are less likely to receive support from their employers for training and education and, except for older adults, are more likely to perceive barriers to participation. They are channeled into different types of academic and career-training programs than men, young adults, European-Americans, and people with higher levels of education. Adult education participation rates increased for most groups over the 1990s, but gains were proportionately greatest among people in the later phases of the life course. In fact, the proportion of older people participating in adult education classes in 1999 was unprecedented. Because age was a weaker predictor of participation in adult education at the end of the 1990s than it was at the beginning of the decade, it appears that the age-graded roles of student, worker, and retiree are becoming increasingly blurred.
The second part of my dissertation uses data from the National Longitudinal Surveys to examine the long-term effects of differential participation in adult education and training. Because I am especially interested in understanding womenÕs resilience as well as their vulnerability to economic, social, and health problems, I restrict my sample to two NLS cohorts of women. The rare longitudinal data structure of overlapping content among cohorts allows me to test whether the returns to investments in human capital vary over time and across cohorts. I highlight particular historic and economic factors that influence the relationship between education, training, and various outcome variables. Measures of women's participation in educational and training programs are the key predictor variables for numerous outcome measures, such as economic and occupational status and physical and mental health. I use multilevel regression models for longitudinal data with time-dependent covariates.
I find that as they age, women who engage in formal adult education are more likely than non-participants to have stable employment and family histories, economic security, and good mental and physical health. My analysis of the NLS cohorts offers some support for the possibility of later life education and training reducing initial social and economic disparities within cohorts. For example, women without a high school degree who engaged in on-the-job training saw their earnings increase at a faster rate than college graduates who did not participate in training. Those who did not update their skills over time, however, experienced stagnation or declines in real wages, leading to growing wage inequality over time within education groups.
These results point to several implications for policy and practice. First, one of the most pervasive ways public policy can affect the association between socioeconomic origins and destinations is through the expansion of education and training opportunities. If implemented carefully, expanding adult learning opportunities may allow more individuals to acquire the skills, knowledge and experiences needed to survive and thrive in today's global economy. To truly become a lifelong learning society, cultural values must be adjusted and educational institutions must be reorganized to meet a broader range of Americans' needs and interests, including older adults and the undereducated. Policies are needed that increase state and federal funding for lifelong learning opportunities and that encourage employers' investments in updating their workers' skills. Compared to most other industrialized countries, American companies provide little formal training to front-line workers. In previous decades, the vast majority of businesses improved productivity by slashing labor costs through mass production, downsizing, outsourcing, and deskilling. These short-term productivity gains, however, reduced the nation's long-term economic competitiveness, living standards, and income equality. The results from my dissertation suggest that an alternative strategy of heavy investments in education and training will offer greater prosperity and broader opportunities for more Americans in the long run.
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