In this article, we explore the use of Facebook targeted advertisements for the collection of survey data. We illustrate the potential of survey sampling and recruitment on Facebook through the example of building a large employee--employer linked data set as part of The Shift Project. We describe the workflow process of targeting, creating, and…

This study explores how student employment affects college persistence and how these effects differ by individual likelihood of participating in student employment. I analyze data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 using propensity score matching and stratification-multilevel analysis. This study finds that engaging in intense…

Prior research indicates that future workers will not possess enough training to contribute to a robust U.S. labor market, especially in "middle-skill" roles that require some postsecondary education but not a 4-year degree. At the same time, the last 30 years have borne witness to an increased likelihood that middle-skill individuals…

Over one in three students who started college in 2012 did not enroll in the fall immediately following their high school graduation. Despite the prevalence of delayed college enrollment, however, little is known about its consequences for labor market outcomes. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this paper examines…

Over one third of students in the U.S. who started college in 2012 did not enroll in the fall immediately following their high school graduation. Despite the prevalence of delayed college enrollment, however, little is known about the reasons for the delay and the consequences for academic and labor markets outcomes. Conventional human capital…

Colleges offer remedial coursework to help students enrolling in post-secondary education who are not adequately prepared to succeed in college-level courses. Despite the prevalence of remediation, previous research presents contradictory findings regarding its short- and long-term effects. This paper uses a doubly robust inverse probability…

Since the seminal introduction of the propensity score (PS) by Rosenbaum and Rubin, PS-based methods have been widely used for drawing causal inferences in the behavioral and social sciences. However, the PS approach depends on the ignorability assumption: there are no unobserved confounders once observed covariates are taken into account. For…

Today, many undergraduates are themselves raising children. But does college-going by parents improve their offspring's educational attainment? I address this question using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth--1979 and linked Children and Young Adults Survey. I first model postnatal college enrollment and bachelor's completion by…

Often in sociology, researchers are confronted with nonnormal variables whose joint distribution they wish to explore. Yet, assumptions of common measures of dependence can fail or estimating such dependence is computationally intensive. This article presents the copula method for modeling the joint distribution of two random variables, including…

Using a sample of youth who graduated from high school in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this paper examines the impact of high school math curriculum on the decision to go to college. Results that control for unobserved differences between students and their families suggest that a more rigorous high school math curriculum is associated with a…

Educational attainment sits at the core of research on social stratification in the United States. An extensive literature details the inequalities in access to levels of education, the socioeconomic rewards conferred upon those reaching higher levels of schooling, and the prospects for social mobility among those able to attain a college degree.…

This study used data from 5,382 adolescents from the 1997 United States (US) National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) to investigate developmental pathways of alcohol use, marijuana use, sexual risk behaviors, and delinquency across ages 14 to 20; examine interrelationships among these risk behaviors across adolescence; and evaluate…

Many students enroll in less selective colleges than they are qualified to attend, despite low graduation rates at these institutions. Some scholars have argued that qualified students should enroll in the most selective colleges because they have greater resources to support student success. However, selective college attendance is endogenous, so…

Adult students are an important component of the current U.S education landscape. They account for over 40% of the degree-seeking fresh enrollees in the U.S. colleges and according to the U.S. Department of Education, their growth will soon outpace that of traditional students. Adult students have also received considerable attention in higher…

On the basis of those respondents in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) who change jobs with an intervening period of education reinvestment, the conventional assumption of linearity of log wages in years of schooling is strongly rejected: a typical reinvestment for the 1980 through 1993 period is associated with a rise of about 3.5…