High School and Beyond Follow-up Surveys

NORC has partnered with the University of Minnesota to continue the High School and Beyond (HS&B) Study, contacting individuals who were sophomores and seniors in 1980 for the Sixth Follow-up. The University of Minnesota’s Sociology Professor, John Robert Warren, has been awarded a grant (NIH/NIA grant number R01AG058719-01A1) to study education’s protective role against Alzheimer’s Disease (Grant SG-20-717567) and other dementias. Co-Investigators include Chandra Muller from the University of Texas at Austin, Eric Grodsky from the University of Wisconsin, and Jennifer Manly from Columbia University.

In 2014 and 2015, with grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Institute for Education Statistics to The University of Texas’ Sociology Professor, Chandra Muller, NORC partnered with the University of Texas to conduct a follow-up study with the 1980 sophomore cohort (N=14,825) of the HS&B sample. In 2015, with grant funding from the National Science Foundation, to University of Texas (Chandra Muller, Principal Investigator), NORC conducted a follow-up study with the 1980 senior cohort (N=11,995). Co-Investigators include John Robert Warren from the University Minnesota and Eric Grodsky from the University of Wisconsin. Data from the first midlife follow-ups are available for researchers from the National Center for Education Statistics through their Restricted-Use Data License.

The newest HS&B follow-up survey collects current information on sample members' labor force experience, health status, family roles, and expectations for continued work and retirement showing how this representative sample has changed from adolescence through midlife. This follow-up also collects measures of cognition to understand the connections among education, health, and aging. Study respondents have the opportunity to participate in a whole blood draw or saliva collection, as we look to understand how people’s genes and other signs of health influence them throughout their lives. These new data will make the existing HS&B data more relevant and useful for the research community by joining the already robust data series from the 1980 base year survey and five follow-ups that took place between 1982 and 2015. This valuable resource will be used to study a number of issues related to the consequences for midlife health and labor force participation of adolescent and early adult circumstances and characteristics.

Selected bibliography of contemporary research generated from HS&B data collected from 1980-2015


  • Carroll, Jamie M., Chandra Muller, Eric Grodsky, and John Robert Warren. 2017 "Tracking Health Inequalities from High School to Midlife." Social Forces, 96(2):591-628. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sf/sox065
  • Grigorian, K., T. Hoffer, and J. Connelly, 2017. Results from Different Adaptive Design Methods to Locate and Survey a Longitudinal Sample. Presentation at the Federal Computer Assisted Survey Information Collection meeting, Suitland, MD, April 2017.
  • Warren, John Robert, Carolina Milesi, Karen Grigorian, Melissa Humphries, Chandra Muller, and Eric Grodsky. 2016. “Do Inferences about Mortality Rates and Disparities Vary by Source of Mortality Information? Annals of Epidemiology, Volume 27, Issue 2, 121-127.
  • Bound, John; Brad Hershbein and Bridget Terry Long. 2009. "Playing the Admissions Game: Student Reactions to Increasing College Competition," NBER Working Paper No. 15272. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Statistics,
  • Deluca, Stefanie, and James E. Rosenbaum. 2001. "Individual Agency and the Life Course: Do Low-SES Students Get Less Long-term Payoff for Their School Efforts?" Sociological Focus 34(4):357-76.
  • Eide, Eric R., Mark H. Showalter, and David P. Sims. 2002. "The Effects of Secondary School Quality on the Distribution of Earnings." Contemporary Economic Policy 20(2):160-70.
  • Heckman, James J and Paul A. LaFontaine. 2007. "The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels," NBER Working Paper No. 13670. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research,
  • Heckman, James J. and Paul A. LaFontaine. 2010. "The American High School Graduate Rate: Trends and Levels." The Review of Economics and Statistics, 92(2), 244-62.
  • Lucas, Samuel R. 2001. "Effectively Maintained Inequality: Education Transitions, Track Mobility, and Social Background Effects." American Journal of Sociology, 106(6), 1642-90.
  • Lucas, Samuel R. Good Aaron D. 2001. "Race, Class, and Tournament Track Mobility." Sociology of Education 74(2):139-56.
  • Mahaffy, Kimberly A. 2004. "Girls' Low Self-Esteem: How Is It Related to Later Socioeconomic Achievements?" Gender and Society 18(3):309-27.
  • Marsh, Herbert W., and Sabina Kleitman. 2005. "Consequences of Employment during High School: Character Building, Subversion of Academic Goals, or a Threshold?" American Educational Research Journal 42(2):331-69.
  • Muller Chandra L. 2015. Measuring school contexts. AERA open. 1(4). doi: 10.1177/2332858415613055.
  • Murnane, Richard J., John B. Willett, and John H. Tyler. 2000. "Who Benefits from Obtaining a GED? Evidence from High School and Beyond." Review of Economics and Statistics 82:23-37.
  • Pattison, Evangeleen, Eric Grodsky, and Chandra Muller. 2013. “Is the Sky Falling? Grade Inflation and the Signaling Power of Grades.” Educational Researcher 42 (5): 259-265.
  • Riegle-Crumb, Catherine, Barbara King, Eric Grodsky, and Chandra Muller. 2012. "The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same? Prior Achievement Fails to Explain Gender Inequality in Entry into STEM College Majors Over Time." American Educational Research Journal 49(6):1048-73.
  • Rosenbaum, James. 2001. Chapter 8 “Are Noncognitive Behaviors in School Related to Later Life Outcomes?” Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half. New York, NY: Russell Sage.
  • Tchuente, Guy. 2019. "High school human capital portfolio and college outcomes." Journal of Human Capital 10(3):267-302. doi: 10.1086/687417)
  • Black, Sandra E., Chandra Muller, Alexandra Spitz-Oener, Ziwei He, Koit Hung and John Robert Warren. Forthcoming. "The importance of STEM: High school knowledge, skills and occupations in an era of growing inequality." Research Policy.
  • Smith, Christian Michael, Eric Grodsky and John Robert Warren. 2019. "Late-Stage Educational Inequality: Can Selection on Academic and Noncognitive Skills Explain Waning Social Background Effects?". Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (RSSM). 63:100424. doi: 10.1016/j.rssm.2019.100424.
  • Muller, Chandra, Alicia Duncombe, Jamie M. Carroll, Anna S. Mueller, John Robert Warren, and Eric Grodsky. 2020. "Association of Job Expectations Among High Schoolers and Suicide During Adulthood." JAMA Network Open 3(12):e2027958
  • Warren, John Robert, Chandra Muller, Robert A. Hummer, Eric Grodsky, and Melissa Humphries. 2020. "Which Aspects of Education Matter for Early Adult Mortality? Evidence from the High School and Beyond Cohort " Socius 6:2378023120918082.

WEBSITE

For more information about the HS&B project, visit https://hsandb.norc.org/

RESOURCES

Resources

High School and Beyond Survey Participants

Access the HS&B web survey at https://websurvey.norc.org/HSB

Infographics and Visualizations

 

 

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