The First Year After College: Activities and Their Subsequent Effects
Every year on college campuses student newspapers run articles on the anticipated postgraduate activities of their seniors. Although the slant of the articles changes from year to year depending on events in the broader society, there is often the unstated assumption that what one does in the first year after college may have important implications later on. Entry-level jobs will launch promising careers. Graduate school will qualify students for even more prestigious jobs. Those who do not plan to either work or be in school are alternatively envied or pitied depending on whether they anticipate "finding themselves" in Europe or spending their time in employment offices. Similar themes, but usually from a different perspective, emerge in conversations between college students and their parents. Students whose plans involve graduate school are encouraged to apply early; those who anticipate working are urged to sign up for job interviews. When parents perceive a lack of career direction on the part of their son or daughter, anecdotal evidence suggests that they frequently express alarm, sometimes with explicit reference to the cost of a college education. Again, behind such alarm is the assumption that the first year after completing college is a critical one and that spending time neither working nor in school has long-term disadvantages. Especially if it looks as though the student might leave college without a degree, the worry is that he or she will never return to finish it. In this article we empirically examine this common assumption that the first year after college is a crucial and strategic one. We show that further schooling and work are the most common activities immediately to follow college, but for a fairly large number of young men and women the first year is spent neither working nor in school. We question what difference this might make. Do the activities right after college set young men and women on different trajectories? We address this question by examining a variety of later outcomes, including educational attainment, income, marriage, and childbearing. Given the frequency with which the importance of the first year after college comes up in everyday discourse, there has been surprisingly little work examining the relationship between activities in the first year after leaving college and subsequent outcomes. An exception is Loy's study of athletes [17]. Instead, the empirical work involving activities after leaving college has focused on those who leave at least once before obtaining a B.A., and tends to ask how the dropouts or stopouts differ from those who go straight through college [for example, 1, 7, 25, 26, 35, 36]. The theoretical motivation for our work arises from the life course perspective. As Elder has stated, "The life-course consists of interlocking trajectories or pathways across the lifespan that are marked by sequences of social transitions [7, p. 1121]." These trajectories are conditioned by their historical context [for example, 8, 21, 27] and by their typically being age-graded [10, 29, 41]. Both the timing and order of events are important [15, 19, 23, 34]. A central tenant of the life-course perspective is that the order in which events occur matters and that the process remembers its past. For example, as Rindfuss, Swicegood, and Rosenfeld [30] demonstrate, the nature of transitions in the school and work sphere affect the subsequent timing of parenthood. Given that schooling is typically viewed as a transitional stage between the relatively carefree existence of adolescence and the more structural responsibility of the adult working world [for example, 20], the year of this transition should be a special year. It marks the end of a life-course phase for all except those who go directly to graduate school. To preview our findings, we show that considerable diversity exists in the activities that immediately follow leaving college. …