Milling about to settling down: Race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and the job mobility patterns of high school dropouts

Little is known about dropouts' job mobility in the years following their exit from school, an activity that greatly impacts wage growth and lifetime earnings. The average dropout enters the labor market slowly, holds many jobs, and shows difficulties in securing stable employment Some economists would argue that this pattern is congruent with job shopping activity. Dropouts learn about their own propensities and strengths by sampling many jobs, then locate a job in which their credentials pay off, and settle in. For other economists, dropouts are not shopping for a job, but "milling about." They move haphazardly from one dead-end job to the next, and make no progress toward any career.;In this study, I investigate whether dropouts' employment patterns match the "job shopping" or the "milling about" theory, and whether, race/ethnicity and educational attainment shape dropouts' labor market histories. I use multiple-spell, discrete-time survival analysis to analyze weekly employment data for a national random sample of dropouts from the NLSY. Specifically, I model the occurrence of three events---voluntary quits, lay-offs, and re-employment---over time, and estimate the effects of race, highest grade attended, cognitive skills, and GED acquisition on dropouts' job mobility.;The study yields three important findings. One, male dropouts' careers appear to stabilize over time, but the predicted durations of the jobs they enter a decade after labor market entry remain quite short. Two, there are important racial/ethnic differences in dropouts' job mobility patterns. Hispanics tend to settle into jobs earlier than their Black and White peers, who appear to engage in a job search process. Eventually, White dropouts' careers tend to stabilize earlier than the careers of their Black peers. Three, of all the educational attainment measures included in the study, GED-status has the biggest effect. The acquisition of a GED appears to magnify the racial/ethnic differences in dropouts' mobility patterns. Upon GED receipt, the careers of Black and Hispanic dropouts tend to stabilize, and White dropouts' job mobility increases sharply. The GED effect does not attenuate over time, which suggests that White GED-certified dropouts might aspire for jobs to which they cannot gain access.