The Impacts of School-Business Partnerships on the Early Labor-Market Success of Students

Abstract

[Excerpt] This chapter examines the effects of improved signaling of student achievement in high school on the labor market success of recent high-school graduates. The chapter is organized into three sections. In the first section, we reproduce the argument that Bishop put forth in 1985 that better signaling of student achievement to employers would improve the quality of the jobs that recent high-school graduates could obtain and strengthen incentives to learn. In the second section, we analyze longitudinal data on eight graders in 1988 and attempt to measure the effect of school-employer partnerships on their subsequent success in the labor market, testing the hypotheses put forward in 1985. The final section of the chapter discusses the research and policy implications of the findings.