Actress Jennifer Lawrence in 2014. (Danny Moloshok/Reuters)
On a “60 Minutes” episode that aired this past weekend, Jennifer Lawrence admitted she was a “middle school dropout.” It felt like a confession.
But it’s the kind of confession in which Forbes’s top-earning actress of 2015 and 2016 humbly admitted to defeating demographic destiny and becoming one of the most successful middle school dropouts ever.
In the interview, Lawrence told CBS reporter Bill Whitaker she felt “stupid,” “dumb” and “clueless” at school, and that she left at age 14 and moved to New York City to begin acting.
Lawrence, now 27, is one of about 12 million U.S. residents 25 or older who never made it past middle school and never earned a GED.
Their ranks are shrinking. They’re increasingly marginalized. And, with one notable exception, they almost never make headlines or star in a four-part cinematic retelling of “The Hunger Games.”
Many of them are immigrants. Most are Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian or of multiple races. They work on farms and in factories, but also on spacecraft and with statistics. In some corners of the labor market, they persist and even thrive.
They can have incomes in the top 25 percent, and some are even 1 percenters like Lawrence.
You find them most in farms and ranches, factories and slaughterhouses. Middle-school dropouts (here applied more broadly to include elementary-school dropouts and those who never attended school) also end up in the country’s fast-shrinking apparel industry and in lower-paying services jobs. But here prevalence is as much an indicator of survival as it is success: These jobs don’t lead to top incomes.
Consider instead the industries where someone who never started high school can earn almost as much as any other worker. They tend to be jobs with low learning requirements or with strong vocational training systems, like barbers or truckers.
For the record, those high-earning dropout barbers seem to be a quirk of the demographics — of approximately 200 industries large enough for this analysis, barbers had the widest median-age gap between middle-school dropouts and the profession as a whole. The margin of error is relatively high, and older workers tend to earn more.
Barbers are typical. In about 85 percent of the industries we considered, the median age among workers age 25 and older who didn’t make it out of middle school was higher than that of those who did.
Education requirements evolved after World War II, and those born after the conflict were much more likely to have completed middle school than those born before. Immigration policy also had an effect — we’ll touch on that shortly.
If you instead define success as earning enough to place you in the top 25 percent nationwide, you find a handful of top-earning professions in which the less-educated represent a minuscule but well-compensated share of the industry’s workforce. Not unlike Jennifer Lawrence in acting.
These industry distributions help dictate that the most successful middle-school dropouts tend to follow a specific geographic distribution, as well. The states where they earn closest to the overall follow certain industries. States with strong mining, farming and resource extraction — and without a large population — top the list.
Lawrence’s home state of Kentucky has the highest share of native-born middle-school dropouts (6.1 percent). Texas and California top the list, once you include immigrants.
About three out of every five people with less than a middle school education immigrated to the United States. Two out of those three came from Mexico or Central America. Many of the others are of retirement age.
Every U.S. state (and D.C.) has made school attendance mandatory through age 16 or higher, barring parental permission or extenuating circumstances. As a result, most Americans who got out before high school were either born before World War II ended or in another country.
It shows up in the racial and ethnic distribution. The majority of non-Hispanic white middle-school dropouts are age 65 or older. For comparison, only a fifth of the equivalent Hispanic population is that old.
In raw numbers, Hispanic residents also top the list of the most successful Americans with less than a high school education, based on those older than 25 with positive earnings in the previous year, but their population-adjusted rate is in line with the levels seen by other minority groups.
Jennifer Lawrence is exceptional. She doesn’t represent a typical middle-school dropout, but then again none of the top-earning dropouts do. It’s just not a normal outcome.
The U.S. economy isn’t built for someone without an education. The jobs that middle-school dropouts work aren’t the ones that vault them to the top of the income ladder, and the ones that pay them well employ only a tiny number of lucky individuals, like Lawrence.
from Wonkblog http://ift.tt/2HRjZwa
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