Education and Transition to Adulthood

PROJECT SUMMARY
Education plays a central role in structuring students' transitions to adulthood, placing them on trajectories
that have important implications for long-term health. This project contributes to our understanding of the
relationship between education and a healthy transition to adulthood by creating an unprecedented link
between school district administrative records and data from the US Census Bureau's Center for
Administrative Records Research and Applications (CARRA). Previous research using school administrative
records has provided important insights into the effects of educational practices and policies on academic
achievement. Our linked data will bring the power of school administrative data to bear on young adult
outcomes with important implications for long-term health. This project focuses on two central ways that
schools structure students' opportunities to learn: course placements and teacher assignments. Drawing on life
course theory this project argues that understanding the effects of students' educational experiences and
contexts requires an understanding of their highly sequenced nature. Accordingly, this project examines how
exposure to different courses and teachers shapes students' odds of exposure to subsequent educational
contexts, and how these contexts interact to generate long-term effects. This project begins by estimating the
short- and long-term effects of student exposure to courses and teachers, using quasi-experimental variation
where possible. Short-term outcomes include student test scores, coursetaking, and school suspensions; long-
term outcomes, many of which come from CARRA, include high school graduation, tertiary attendance and
graduation, labor market outcomes, criminal justice outcomes, disability status, health insurance, family
formation, and mortality. These analyses are supplemented by descriptive evidence tracing students' pathways
through subsequent educational environments in order to better understand what kinds of trajectories are
associated with different patterns of long-term effects. This project will thus: 1) Build unique data
infrastructure linking students' educational records with indicators of a healthy transition to adulthood. These
data will serve as a model for future linkages, and their population-level coverage will allow us to move beyond
one-size-fits-all understandings of courses and teachers to examine how effects vary across schools. 2)
Estimate the effects of course placement, as well as teachers' value-added, on students' short and medium-term
academic outcomes, and long-term educational attainment, exposure to the criminal justice system, early labor
market experiences, disability, health insurance, and mortality. 3) Trace the coursework and teacher pathways
associated with outcomes indicating a healthy transition to adulthood.