Senator GRUENING. I agree.

Mr. MERRICK. I would like to have that pamphlet you referred to there, or is that your only copy.

Mr. GOLDY. This is our file copy, but I would certainly be happy to make this available to you.

Mr. MERRICK. No doubt we can get it from the Bureau of Labor. What is the date on that so I can?

Mr. GOLDY. This is a paper presented to the American Personnel and Guidance Association dated March 23, 1959.

(At the request of the chairman the following address given by Mr. Wolfbein was inserted in the record.)

THE TRANSITION FROM SCHOOL TO WORK: A STUDY OF THE SCHOOL LEAVER (By Seymour L. Wolfbein, Chief, Division of Manpower and Employment, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics)

One of the more persistent phenomena of recent labor market history in the United States has been the comparatively higher unemployment rates which prevail among young workers-higher than for any other age group, no matter what stage of the business cycle in which we find ourselves.

That this is so is perhaps not surprising in view of the fact that the younger person is obviously at the start of his career development, tends to change jobs more frequently, has less seniority, etc. In order to study this matter at somewhat greater depth, however, the Labor Department has been conducting a series of experimental surveys of the employment and unemployment experiences of young people during their first years in the labor market, focusing particularly on the boys and girls who drop out of school before graduating and those who do graduate from high school but do not go on to college.

These studies have yielded some significant findings with respect to the labor force experiences of this group. They have also resulted in a fund of other information concerning the characteristics of people who leave school which, together with the data on their labor market adjustment, may be of interest to the educator in general, to the guidance and counseling practitioner in particular. With this in view, the present paper attempts three things:

First, it describes very briefly the nature and conduct of these surveys; second, it present in summary form some of the basic findings; and third, it submits some suggestions and hypotheses concerning the school leaver and his relationship to the educational and guidance process.

I

The Bureau of Labor Statistics made surveys of school leavers in seven areas. In each case the surveys were actually conducted by local educational institutions on contract with BLS, using the same concepts, techniques, and schedules.1 In each area information was obtained on all school leavers (defined to inelude all persons who (a) dropped out before graduating, and (b) who graduated from high school but did not go on to college) for a period ranging from 1 to 5 years prior to the time of the survey. The total or universe count of school leavers amounted to approximately 22,000-including approximately 12,000 who graduated and 10,000 who dropped out prior to graduation. Information on age, sex, IQ, school achievement, etc. was obtained for these school leavers from their school records.

Additional data on their subsequent history since leaving school were obtained from a sample chosen from the universe of school leavers. Sampling ratios varied among the areas depending on their size and composition, but resulted in a sample of approximately 6,500 cases chosen for followup and interview. A total

1 The areas included, the institutions conducting the surveys, and the principal investigators were: Providence, R.I., Public School System of Providence, Department of Guidance and Placement, Mary Basso, director; Utica, N.Y., Cornell University School of Industrial Relations, Prof. Leonard Adams; Harrison County, W. Va., West Virginia University, School of Industrial Relations, Prof. Gerald Somers; Port Huron and Saginaw, Mich., University of Michigan, School of Education, Prof. S. C. Hulslander: Phoenix, Ariz., Arizona State College, School of Education, Profs. R. Baker and W. B. Abraham; Evansville, Ind.. Evansville College, Dean Long, vice president.

of about 4,000 of these were found and interviewed person to person; about 2,500 had moved away (to jobs in other areas, to the military, through marriage. etc.) and information on these was obtained from their families or adjacent households.

Since this series of studies was limited to seven areas, the summary results presented below should not be considered as necessarily representative of the United States as a whole. It will be noted from the appended list that the areas included were all moderately sized, ranging in population from about 30,000 to 350,000. They include no rural communities and no really large metropolitan areas. The results for each of the areas are, of course, based on reliable samples and are representative for each or all seven combined. However, the reader should remember the caveat that this may not necessarily be so for the United States as a whole.

II

We discuss below some of the summary findings from our school leaver surveys, especially those which may be of interest in guidance and counseling. The detailed and complete data will be forthcoming soon in an overall BLS bulletin on this subject. The following seven points are presented briefly with some of the relevant statistics.

1. Scores based on the Otis Mental Ability Group Test were available for a little less than half of the dropouts and a little over half of the high-school graduates. They were distributed as follows for the seven areas combined:

Remembering the limitations of any group test of this sort, as well as the importance of such other factors as motivation, personality, temperament, interest, etc., the following observations seem warranted:

As is to be expected, the two groups (graduates and dropouts) can be differentiated rather sharply on the basis of IQ. The proportion with scores of less than 85 among dropouts was triple that among graduates; the proportion with scores of 110 and over among graduates was almost triple that among dropouts.

A score of 110 or better is often used as a rough indicator for successful completion of college. Less than 1 in 16 among dropouts (and about 1 in 6 among the graduates) achieved this score. Considering the fact that many girls. prefer marriage; that for many boys and girls interest and, in fact, talents do not come under the academic context; that for many with even much higher IQ's formal college training is not necessarily indicated-all these make it a fair question to ask whether there really is a significantly high wastage in many of these people not going on to college. That there is some is unquestionably true; but that the dropout is a really strategic factor in the problem of the supply of college-trained personnel is subject to question, at least on the basis of these limited data. Some of the summary findings presented immediately below are also relevant to this observation, as we shall see.

One other observation may be made at this time. While one may generalize on some of the characteristics of school leavers-whether they be dropouts or graduates who do not go on to college-it is also clear that we are dealing with a significantly heterogeneous group. Some scored comparatively very low on a group mental ability test; others scored comparatively very high. Some dropouts scored way above some graduates-and vice versa. In every one of our other findings the heterogeneity of this group is underscored and the classic tenet of education and guidance concerning individual differences is similarly emphasized. The import of all this in terms of program and policy will be referred to later again.

2. Turning now specifically to the approximately 10,000 dropouts studied in. these surveys we find, first, that they left school at the following ages:

In every one of the areas surveyed, school attendance was obligatory until age 16, although in most of them a student 14 years or over could work and go to school under specified conditions in accordance with State law and, of course, the provisions of the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act. A small proportion did leave before that age, and while the school records were not unequivocally clear on this point, important reasons included ill health as well as marriage among the girls.

That dropouts do tend to leave upon attaining the legal permissible age is shown by the fact that the modal age for dropping out was 16-one out of every three left at this age. It is equally important to note, however, that a significant proportion of the dropouts-one in eight-left when they were already 19 years and even older, well past the average age for high school graduation.

Thus, the commonly drawn picture of the potential dropout straining at the leash to leave school and doing so immediately upon reaching the legally permissible age, while true of many, may very well be exaggerated in view of the performance of the majority of this sample of 10,000, who left school well past that age.

3. The fact that a big group drops out at an age already beyond that usual for high school graduation points to a substantial amount of retardation in school achievement for many of them.

The survey figures show that no less than 85 percent of the dropouts were behind their age group by at least 1 year; 53 percent were behind their age group by 2 or more years of schoolwork. As Elizabeth Bernert has said so well of these boys and girls: "The road to graduation is a long one, and perhaps a lonely one, for the majority of their age mates have already been graduated."' It is not surprising, therefore, to note the following findings:

It is of enormous significance that as many as almost one out of every 3 dropouts did not get beyond the 8th grade; that almost 2 out of 3 never reached senior high school-that is, dropped out before the 10th grade. And while we will summarize the implications of these findings later on, it will not be amiss to note at this point that a significant and substantial proportion of dropouts exist from the schools well before most kinds of occupational information or other facets of the guidance and counseling process even begin to function under current conditions. Practice on this score varies substantially, of course, but among the areas surveyed only about two out of every five dropouts had had any manner of vocational guidance at all.

4. As do most other surveys of this kind, the studies described here examined and recorded reasons for dropping out of school. This was done from two vantage points: The reasons noted in the school records were obtained, and the dropouts

2 Elizabeth Bernert, "America's Children," New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1958.

themselves were asked why they left school. Here is a brief summary of the results:

There was, of course, a very sizable difference in reasons by area. In some areas, for example, none of the school records nor the dropouts themselves gave "reached age 16" as a reason for leaving school. In others, the proportions were quite substantial. However, the reasons recorded from both sources (and they hardly agreed in some of the categories) were not very helpful or perhaps even meaningful in any attempt to get at the primary causes for dropping out of school. In addition, most of the reasons given did not correlate with any kind of objective standard or even reasonable hypothesis. For example, one might presume that students who scored low on the mental ability test might assign "adverse school experience" much more than those who scored higher up on the scale. Our studies showed, instead, that students at both ends of the scale gave this as a reason for dropping out. Neither did we find any significant correlation between reason for leaving high school and highest school grade completed by the dropout.

Thus, our experience coincides with other surveys in this field: it is difficult, if not well-nigh' impossible, to elicit perceptive information on the basic factors generating dropouts from school through these methods. We were, however, able to examine this in more depth in the personal interviews, which suggested at least two things:

First, although those indicating work as a reason for leaving school were not inconsiderable in number and proportion, the financial reason for dropping out is apparently less important than is commonly supposed. It is true that the years covered by these surveys represented a period of generally high levels of economic activity, but none of the places included were by any means areas of labor shortage; in some the case was quite the opposite. The lesser importance of the economic reason for dropping out is apparently confirmed by some of the ongoing studies of the Office of Education.

Second, dissatisfaction with school (adverse school experience) was the single most important rationalization for leaving school. In further interviews with these boys and girls comparatively few expressed any opinion on how school could have been more useful. Among those who did, however, about a third of the boys and about half the girls asked for more vocational counseling. "A better curriculum" and "better teachers" were among the more preponderant suggestions. We will comment on this later on.

5. Turning now to the subsequent experiences of school leavers after exiting from the educational system, we find first that working and looking for work played their expected significant role. Just about every boy, be he dropout or graduate, entered the labor force. Girl graduates also had very high labor market participation: anywhere from 85 to 95 out of every 100 of these girls (depending on the area) were in the work force. The only group which differed significantly from this pattern were the girl dropouts-about one in three did not enter the labor force at all. The reason for their lower labor market activity

may have been the higher marriage rate among them, as can be seen from the following summary:

Leaving out for the moment the kinds of jobs these people got and their subsequent employment and unemployment experience, it is of some interest to note that the school leavers did find jobs with almost startling promptness once they began to look for work. Seven out of every 10 boys-dropouts or graduates- got work within a month after beginning to look; the girls did even better: almost 8 out of every 10-again, whether graduate or dropout-began working within a month after their initial search for employment.

6. From then on out, however, the experiences of the high school graduate and the dropout begin to contrast rather sharply.

The first important difference that emerges relates to the kind of job obtained. In fact, among the girls, the contrast is very pointed and marked. Girl graduates generally obtained employment in the white-collar clerical fieldsespecially as stenographers, typists, and bookkeepers; girl dropouts concentrated in sales and such service jobs as waitresses:

Thus, the proportion of girl graduates in clerical jobs was more than quadruple that among the dropouts, while the proportion among dropouts in the sales field and such areas as unskilled labor and waitress was very much higher than among the girl graduates.

The contrasting labor market experience among these girls is strongly related to the kind of training received in the high school. In fact, our findings underscore again that for girl school leavers, completion of high school makes a clear cut differences. The commercial courses which the girl graduates were able to pursue and complete (in contrast to the girl dropouts) prepared them to meet the job needs of their communities in what is and has been for some time, of course, a shortage field.

No such unequivocal statement can be made for the boys, however. A somewhat bigger proportion of the boys dropouts went into various unskilled jobs in the factory, as laborers, as filling station operators, etc. than did the graduates. About 37 percent of the boy dropouts-more than one in three entered into these fields as their first jobs as against 28 percent for the boy graduates. Roughly the same proportion-13 percent for dropouts and 15 percent for graduates entered sales jobs and the rest were scattered among various clerical and semiskilled work.

In terms of the relationship between high school training and subsequent job experience, there was little if any among the boys in contrast to the girls. While most boys did have some introduction to vocational courses such as shop, metalworking, welding, woodworking, mechanical drawing, printing, auto mechanics, etc., the proportions which took any extended sequence of training in these areas