Youth transition and place in New Zealand

Abstract

High levels of unemployment among youth and its documented effects on future labour market outcomes have lead to a heightened focus on the way youth view education and the labour market. This concern has generated a vast literature. Few of the studies consulted consider the role which place plays in the transition from school to work. In very few cases is the local labour market addressed in accounting for variation in youth transitions. In this unique study we explore the perceptions of teenagers near the end of their schooling in two very different locations: Kawerau, a small 'company town' experiencing high levels of inactivity, benefit dependency and migration in the Bay of Plenty, and Wellington the capital of New Zealand, a high income metropolitan centre, with a robust and highly developed local labour market. After controlling for age, ethnicity, household size and labour market activity of the families as well as their educational and employment expectations this study compares the responses of 254 youth in two otherwise similar secondary schools. Several hypotheses are tested about the possible role of town size and hence local labour market opportunity on student expectations of both education and employment. Differences in their national and local role models are also compared. Also explored is the degree to which the association between job expectations and mobility differs across the two locations. Our overall conclusion was of the limited impact schooling in very different local labour market makes on the income, job and education expectations. Previous mobility experience and in-school work showed very little differences across the two schools - even when controlling for their different demographic characteristics. We found that both sets of students had quite unrealistic expectations but maybe this is characteristic of youth in general. However, these were greater among students in Kawerau and it is possible that lack of role models in the community caused students to switch their expectations to 'virtual' role models, those they saw on television and read about in the media. This lack of personal contact with real ideal types within the community may account for the more unreal expectations such students had. Although not what we expected this does turn out to be a reflection of local labour market size and character. Clearly the links between place and expectations are more complex than the literature has explored to date.