Consequences of Parental Job Loss for Adolescents' School Performance & Educational Attainment

Ariel Kalil

Economic instability and job displacement remain permanent features of the American economy. The proposed research will study the association between parental job loss and adolescents’ academic achievement and attainment. Parental job loss might derail adolescents’ educational plans for several reasons. A family’s strained economic resources might affect its ability to finance a daughter’s education. The daughter might give up her college plans because she believes the family has no funds to send her. A father who loses his job might withdraw emotionally from his son, leading to changes in the son’s academic performance or in his engagement in problem behavior. A teenager’s perceptions of the returns to education might diminish upon seeing his or her parent lose a job. Diminished performance and aspirations could influence how well adolescents perform in high school, whether they attend college, the quality of the college they attend, and whether or how soon they complete college. This is important because educational attainment has a profound impact on future employment and earnings. To answer these questions, I will use data from several longitudinal data sets to: 1. Analyze the association between parental job loss and adolescents’ high school performance (e.g., grades, test scores, suspensions, graduation) and college attendance. 2. Examine the mediating roles of teenagers’ psychosocial functioning (e.g., locus of control, self-concept, behavior problems) and parents’ financial investments in the teenagers’ education; and 3. Investigate how the incidence, patterns, and consequences of job loss differ in black and white families. A major contribution of the present study is to compare the impact of parental job loss among black and white families. Research suggests that black adults are more likely to be dismissed or laid off than whites and to suffer more severe economic consequences of job loss. Results from this research could help to explain why blacks are only half as likely as whites to complete college. Such findings could then inform public policy solutions that redress the college completion gap and, by extension, the subsequent economic inequalities that result from differences in educational attainment.

About Ariel Kalil

Ariel Kalil, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. She received her B.A. in Psychology and also in French Literature at the University of Wisconsin (1991). She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan (1996). From 1996 to 1999, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Program on Poverty and Social Welfare Policy, an interdisciplinary research center co-sponsored by the Schools of Public Policy, Law, and Social Work. Her work focuses broadly on child development in disadvantaged social circumstances. Previously, she has studied the impact of welfare reform on children’s development; the school, work, and psychological status of teenage mothers; and the influence of multigenerational living arrangements and non-marital cohabitation on family processes and parent and child well-being. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Child Development, Demography, the Journal of Adolescent Research, the Journal of Marriage and the Family, and the Journal of Social Issues. At the Harris School, she teaches graduate courses in child development and public policy. Dr. Kalil’s research has been funded by grants from the Spencer Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the William T. Grant Foundation.