Work-Bound Youth, Schools, Families and Employers: Making the Connections

Deirdre Royster

When young people seek jobs, they almost always seek out the assistance of at least a few adult sponsors. They typically seek help from parents, teachers, family friends, neighbors, older family members, counselors and even lose acquaintances. Adults then decide when, where, how and whether to assist youth. The focus of this paper is an analysis of 6 diverse, young job-seeker’s experiences with adult sponsors over a 2-year period starting when students were about to graduate from the same vocational high school in 1999. While some adult sponsors can be extremely helpful in connecting young job seekers to entry-level employers when they choose to, the ability to assist students is often constrained by overarching patterns of race- and sex-segregation that have already shaped adult work-trajectories. I observed this pattern primarily among the adults that students of color relied upon. Another factor that impacted students transitions, and that is far less well understood, is sponsor ambivalence. Sponsor ambivalence occurs when adults decide NOT to assist youth in all of the ways that they might. I observed some sponsor ambivalence for each of the six students that I followed, but I observed the greatest sponsor ambivalence for the African American man and woman I studied, the least for the Latina and White females I studied. Frankly, I am still puzzled by much of the sponsor ambivalence I observed, but I think there are some identifiable patterns. For example sponsor ambivalence seemed to arise when young people’s ideas and adult sponsor ideas about job prospects appeared to differ, when relationships between adults and youth were contentious, when adults expressed concerns about students’ maturity, reliability, and potential, and when adults were concerned about how assisting one youth could affect the adult’s future ability to assist other youth. These observations held whether adult sponsors were formal (school personnel) or informal. My observations over 2 years have led me to conclude that African American youth bear a greater burden of demonstrating sponsor-worthiness than other youth and that sponsor ambivalence can, and sometimes does, jeopardize successful school-work transitions.

About Deirdre Royster

Deirdre A. Royster is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the College of William and Mary. She earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1996. Her areas of research include racism and racial stratification, the school-to-work transition, labor and labor markets, and affirmative action in higher education. Her work has appeared in Education and Urban Society, Research in Race and Ethnic Relations and her book manuscript, Race and the “Invisible Hand”: The Enduring Power of Segregated Networks in the Blue Collar Trades, is currently under review.