Pathways and Patterns of Education and Workforce Participation in Maryland

The Institute for Research on Poverty ( https://www.irp.wisc.edu/ ) at the University of Wisconsin is a nonpartisan research institution that produces and disseminates rigorous evidence to inform policies and programs to combat poverty, inequality, and their effects in the United States. MLDS Center staff member and Assistant Professor at the Portland State University, Dr. Mathew Uretsky, is the PI of the one-year project.

The overall research objective is to describe and summarize the patterns of academic and workforce participation among Maryland adolescents and young adults. The central hypothesis is that there are distinct identifiable patterns of student academic participation and workforce participation during high school that relate to the odds of remaining engaged in school and continuing to participate in the Maryland workforce. This hypothesis is based on the findings from three preliminary studies, which examined student persistence and achievement into, through, and beyond the fourth year of high school.

To meet the research objectives of the proposed study data visualization will be used to illustrate the patterns of academic and workforce participation in Maryland over a 10 year period. Next, latent class analysis will be used to define distinct subtypes of academic and workforce participation, describing the patterning of student academic participation, performance, and Maryland workforce participation. Third, subgroup analyses will be conducted to examine whether the likelihood of membership in the identified subtypes differs by student characteristics (e.g. race, poverty). Finally, latent variable log odds modeling will be used to examine if membership in the identified subtypes is associated with later academic and workforce outcomes in Maryland.