Three Essays on Education and Labor Market Outcomes of High School Experiences

This dissertation studies US high school student experiences and their transition from the secondary education level into postsecondary US education and into the labor market. It examines the extent to which the changing trends of vocational training can be attributed to changing demand-side or supply-side factors, how involvement in high school extracurricular activities, and how growing up in a bilingual household is associated with labor market outcomes later in life. These outcomes include postsecondary enrollment, college enrollment and completion, and earnings for different longitudinal cohorts of high school students over time. The dissertation uses datasets that follow cohorts of high school graduates from four decades between 1972 – 2012 for up to 12 years after graduation.