Spotlight: “Launchpad Jobs,” Upward Mobility Without a College Degree
Roughly 39% of U.S. high school graduates do not enroll in college immediately after high school. Young people are often told that obtaining a college degree is the path to career success, but new research challenges the notion that entry-level careers that do not require degrees are inherently less lucrative in the long run.
Using American Community Survey Individual Public Use Microdata, researchers from the Burning Glass Institute estimate that nearly twenty percent of non-degree workers earn more than $70,000 (the median salary of college graduates). This finding suggests that, for those who are not college-bound straight out of high school, there are job opportunities that can set them on an upward economic trajectory.
A new report, Launchpad Jobs: Achieving Career and Economic Success without a Degree, explores high-quality jobs that do not require a degree but can support young workers’ growth and advancement over time.
Contributor & Editor
Emily Finchum-Mason is a workforce analyst in the Office of Policy Development and Research, Employment and Training Administration.
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This Spotlight edition is intended to showcase interesting methods and findings from external labor market researchers. All findings and recommendations are those of the report’s authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Employment and Training Administration.
First jobs can act as a launchpad
A key observation of this work is that young workers’ first job choice is critical. Using Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) data, the researchers examine several jobs with similar starting wages that diverge substantially over time. Examples of low-wage occupations are listed in the lefthand column of the figure below. The dark blue circles represent the 10th percentile of starting salaries (essentially a low-end estimate of starting earnings). The light blue circles represent the median salary of the occupations twenty years later. Occupations towards the top of the list indicate the greatest potential for salary growth over time in occupations that do not require a college degree.
This figure highlights stark disparities in salary growth potential between occupations in similar industries. For example, despite similar initial earnings, median earnings for restaurant hosts twenty years into their career ($80,600) vastly exceed median wages for non-restaurant food servers ($38,200).
These observations raise important questions for education and workforce development professionals, namely: How can we systematically identify high-potential jobs that do not require a college degree? And how can we equip young workers to successfully pursue and obtain these roles?
Salaries of occupations with similar starting wages can diverge substantially in the long run
Source: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Starting estimates based on 10th percentile wages. 20-year estimates based on median wages.
Ranking launchpad jobs by measures of job quality
Authors identified launchpad jobs by limiting their exploration to occupations meeting two criteria: (1) at least 20% of workers currently in this occupation have a high school diploma or less education and (2) the job requires a “postsecondary nondegree award” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and at least 30% of workers in this occupation have “Some college, no degree” or less education. Researchers constructed a composite indicator of job quality (the Launchpad Job Score) for the subset of occupations - including expected wages, health insurance access, promotion and advancement potential, and degree of vulnerability to technological disruption - using OEWS, ACS, Glassdoor, and other public data sources.
Researchers found that starting wages vary widely across the spectrum of launchpad jobs, with architecture and engineering, business and financial operations, and construction and extraction occupations offering the highest median starting salaries. But wages are only part of the story.
The following figure shows the how different occupations rank in terms of job quality; occupational groups that are higher along the vertical axis have better composite job quality scores. The size of the bubbles within each occupational group indicates the size of the industry.
The distribution of the Launchpad Job Score reveals that occupational groups with lower median starting salaries, such as military specific occupations ($17,887) rank relatively highly in terms of overall job quality. The opposite relationship is also evident; some occupational groups with reasonable median starting salaries, like construction and extraction fields, score lower than others in terms of job quality.
Job quality of initial opportunities varies widely within occupation groups
Source: Burning Glass Institute analysis
Launchpad jobs and degree attainment
Launchpad jobs do not necessarily substitute for college education. The figure below shows the difference between the percentage of individuals in each occupational group who eventually complete a certificate/AA degree (dark blue) or a bachelors degree (light blue) relative to average degree completion for all 18-year-old workers. Bars that extend to the right of the zero-line indicate occupations with greater likelihood of degree completion, whereas bars that extend to the left indicate reduced likelihood of degree completion.
Cashiers, military tactical operations specialists, electrical/electronic engineering technologists and technicians, and retail salespeople are more likely to eventually earn a degree than the average 18-year-old. This suggests both that launchpad jobs may help propel individuals who face barriers to post-secondary education to complete degrees and, perhaps, that launchpad jobs require and/or facilitate the acquisition of skills that support career advancement.
Young workers in some launchpad jobs are more likely to eventually complete a degree
.
Source: Burning Glass Institute analysis
Improving access to launchpad jobs
Burning Glass researchers made several recommendations relevant to the education and workforce development fields, including increasing access to work-based learning opportunities beginning in high school; integrating Career and Technical Education (CTE) in postsecondary institutions; providing a wider array of informational tools to connect young learners to prospective employers; and investing in career guidance, not just college guidance.
Launchpad Jobs presents a novel approach to identifying promising career pathways for young workers that can lead to upward mobility without a college degree. This approach may inform how we think about high-potential occupations and enhance our understanding of the types of transitive skills that can offer greatest labor market returns for young workers.
This report was summarized and figures were reproduced with the permission of the report’s authors.
Labor Market Metrics
Suggested Citation
Emily Finchum-Mason, “Spotlight: ‘Launchpad Jobs’,” Trendlines, U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration, December 2024, https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/opder/DASP/Trendlines/posts/2024_12/Trendlines_December_2024.html