National Center for Education Statistics
March 2002
The most valuable function of the federal government in the field of education is the provision of data, and the third most valuable form of education data (after NAEP and basic "facts and figures" about schools and universities) comes from longitudinal studies that track the same people over time. Because such studies are expensive and complicated, they don't get done very often. But the "National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988," which began in my days at the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, has just yielded its fourth batch of follow-up data. In the year 2000, these young people were about 26 years old. By this point, 83 percent of them had earned high-school diplomas and 29 percent had a bachelor's degree (or more)-in contrast with the 66 percent who, at age 14, had said they intended to complete college. (Another 47 percent had, however, gathered some postsecondary credits. Only one in four had never stepped foot in a postsecondary institution.) But that's just the tip of a huge data iceberg. There's plenty here on careers, incomes, marriage and family, job satisfaction, etc. And lots of "crosstabs" that link aspects of their backgrounds and education experiences (through 8th grade) to what came later. Nor does this report examine the entire iceberg. It's just the "initial results" from a trove of data that analysts will mine for years to come. You can download it at http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2002321.
