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Title: In Search of a Second Chance: The Consequences of GED Certification, Education and Training for Young Women Without High School Diplomas
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Boudett, Kathryn Parker
In Search of a Second Chance: The Consequences of GED Certification, Education and Training for Young Women Without High School Diplomas
Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1998
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): College Education; Continuing Education; Education, Adult; GED/General Educational Diploma/General Equivalency Degree/General Educational Development; High School Diploma; Income Dynamics/Shocks; Skilled Workers; Skills; Training, On-the-Job; Wage Growth; Women's Education; Women's Studies

In an economy which increasingly values skills, can young women without a high school diploma get a second chance? This thesis is comprised of three essays that explore the effects of participating in a variety of education and credentialing programs available to dropouts. The first two essays focus on the impact of the General Educational Development (GED) certificate, college and training on labor market outcomes of female dropouts in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). In these essays, I explore how a dropout's labor market outcomes change in the first decade after leaving school. I predict that upon GED receipt a woman's rate of growth of annual earned income increases more than it otherwise would have, partly due to increased employment probabilities and partly to higher hourly wages. I also show that off-job training provided by proprietary institutions and government agencies (obtained by nearly half of GED holders and one quarter of other dropouts in this sample) is associated with increased hours worked. Effects of college and on-job training, activities which are less common in this population, are more difficult to estimate accurately. The third essay illustrates the practical challenge of using these findings to make policy recommendations. In particular, should public assistance programs make participation in education programs leading toward GED certification mandatory? I investigate whether individuals who participated in basic education as part of California's Greater Avenues to Independence (GAIN) program improved their scores on a test of basic reading and math skills. Using a variety of methods to control for selection, I find that the confidence interval for the effect of basic education is quite wide. The average education participant was scheduled for 500 hours of classes; for the given sample size I can reject neither the hypothesis of no impact nor the hypothesis that education had the same impact on scores that a similar number of hours of education would have had on the scores of students in traditional high schools. I confirm test score impacts for one county which employed innovative education practices, and identify further uncertainty regarding test impacts for individuals with lower initial skills.
Bibliography Citation
Boudett, Kathryn Parker. In Search of a Second Chance: The Consequences of GED Certification, Education and Training for Young Women Without High School Diplomas. Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1998.