The population of interest is high school students who graduated from a Maryland public high school with a diploma between January and October of 2013 and are between the ages of 16 and 24 at the time of graduation. This is the latest year that high school graduates had five years of available wage data post-high school graduation. This definition of high school graduate was selected to align to reporting definitions used by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in reports on educational attainment and employment of high school graduates.
High school graduates were disaggregated into educational attainment groups. Analyzing wage data by educational attainment is critical to any exploration of wage and industry of employment as:
1. Research suggests employment outcomes and wages may vary by educational attainment;
2. Variation in length of degree program impacts the length of time in the workforce post-degree, which in turn impacts employment outcomes and wages; and Enrollment in school negatively impacts amount of hours available for work each week.
3. Enrollment in school negatively impacts amount of hours available for work each week.
Educational groups were defined as follows:
Some College: High school graduates enrolled for at least one term between fall 2013 and fall 2017 but who did not earn a postsecondary degree and are not actively enrolled in college in the spring 2018 or fall 2018 terms.
Associate’s Graduates: High school graduates who earned a postsecondary Associate’s degree by the end of the fall term 2017 and are not enrolled in college in the spring 2018 and/or fall 2018 terms.
Bachelor’s Graduates: High school graduates who earned a postsecondary Bachelor’s degree by the end of the fall term 2017 and are not enrolled in college in the spring 2018 and/or fall 2018 terms.
Note, some high school graduates received more than one degree during the five year period. Each graduate is counted only once, based upon highest degree attained. For example, if a high school graduate earned an Associate’s degree and then earned a Bachelor’s degree, the high school graduate is counted in the Bachelor’s category. Other high school graduates earned a degree but were still progressing toward an additional degree, therefore these graduates were excluded from the analysis.
The 20th quarter after high school graduation aligns with the postsecondary spring term which would end in May or June of 2018; however, assignment to an educational attainment category is made as of each student’s status in fall 2017 (December 2017 or quarter 18 post-high school graduation). The decision to use this term for placement into an educational attainment category was made to allow students in each category time to transition from college to workforce and thus provide a more accurate picture of wages and industry of employment after college.
The high school graduates included in the wage analysis were selected by using the U. S. Census Bureau Stable or Full-Quarter Employment Methodology (referenced as Full-Quarter throughout this report). This methodology excludes individuals from the median calculation who do not have wage data in either the fiscal quarter before or after the period of interest. For this study, the period of interest is the 20th quarter after high school graduation or fiscal quarter 2 of 2018. Accordingly,individuals were included in the median wage calculation if,in addition to having wages in quarter 2 of 2018, they also had wages in fiscal quarter 1 of 2018 and fiscal quarter 3 of 2018.
The Full-Quarter Employment Methodology was used because it provides a standardized method of determining whose wages to include in the analysis. Using a standardized methodology allows the Center to compare its outcomes to the outcomes in other research that uses this same methodology. More importantly, restricting analysis to “stable wage earners” provides a clearer picture of wage outcomes for workers fully engaged in the workforce and eliminates the potential to deflate median wage calculations by including the wages, or lack of wages, of workers for who are absent, transient, or not fully engaged in the workforce.
The Full-Quarter Employment (Stable) methodology is utilized by the U. S.Census Bureau to calculate average monthly earnings for individuals engaged in stable employment with any employer. The methodology is applied here to derive quarterly, rather than monthly median earnings. https://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/QWI_101.pdf.
Some individuals have wages in a quarter from more than one employer. Those wages were summed and then the sum was used in the median quarterly wage calculation.
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