Federal interest in the Gautreaux program led to the design and implementation of the Moving To Opportunity program in the 1990s, a randomized housing voucher experiment funded by HUD. With colleagues, I assessed the impacts of changes in neighborhood quality on child and family outcomes such as welfare use, employment, special education, and subsequent mobility. For the last fourteen years, I have studied the long-term effects of the Gautreaux residential mobility program in Chicago, which helped residents of public housing relocate to safer neighborhoods through housing vouchers. Understanding the role of housing, neighborhood and social context on youth and family outcomes. In a number of papers, I am considering the role of career education, trade schools and communities colleges in the employment and postsecondary pathways of these urban youth. Other papers in progress considers the transition to work and college for African American youth growing up in Baltimore. A recent paper with Robert Bozick suggests heterogeneity in the motives of non-enrolled youth these motives are partly driven by planful orientations toward work, economic resources and local labor market opportunities. motivation, self-discipline, risk taking), how patterns of noncognitive skills vary by levels of cognitive skills, and how different combinations of cognitive and noncognitive skills predict educational, occupational and delinquent pathways into adulthood.Īn additional program of research examines transitions to work for young people who do not attend college, and more generally to question whether promoting college attendance for all is the best policy for students in America. I have also been pursuing research that considers the role of noncognitive skills (e.g. Even in an era of community college expansion, proprietary schools and evening programs, we found that it matters when you enroll in college after accounting for socioeconomic, life course and institutional factors, youth who delay college significantly reduce their chances of attaining a bachelor’s degree, even within eight years. In a recent Social Forces piece, we tested whether being a “day late” is worse than being “a dollar short” in terms of college enrollment. We suggest that the ‘new’ vocational education has potential to keep youth in school by engaging them with courses relevant for both work and college. In a recent Sociology of Education article, we move beyond traditional research on curricular tracking and show how a balance of academic and career preparation courses might reduce high school dropout. In a project funded by the Department of Education, we examined the state of vocational education, in light of legislation passed in the 1990s intended to reform vocational training into “career and technical education”. One major area of research has focused on the determinants of educational attainment, such as social class, high school courses, noncognitive skills and the timing of educational investments. Grant Foundation, Center for Research on Educational Opportunity at the University of Notre Dame, American Educational Research Association, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education. Casey Foundation, Abell Foundation, Spencer Foundation, National Academy of Education, William T. My research has been made possible by generous support from the Annie E. I am motivated by an interest in rigorous research designs for causal inference using both experimental and non-experimental data, as well as the use of qualitative work to understand causality and the effectiveness of social policies. My research also involves the sociological consideration of education and housing policy. Using interdisciplinary frameworks and multiple methodologies to examine these issues, my current research focuses on the sociology of education, urban sociology, neighborhoods and social inequality in the life course. family, school, neighborhood, peers) affects the outcomes of disadvantaged young people, primarily in adolescence and at the transition to adulthood. I am interested in the way social context (e.g.