Understanding the Impact of Major Life Events on Young People's Academic Achievement and Post-Schooling Careers

Instability and conflict are pervasive features of the transition from adolescence to early adulthood, as young people learn to manage an expanding array of academic, social and familial commitments. Recently, theorists of inequality have suggested that young people’s exposure to such uncertainty during this time is potentially exacerbated by broader processes of individualisation and social change, placing them at heightened risk of marginalisation. In this paper we test this proposition with respect to young people’s emerging career pathways, using longitudinal data from a large cohort of 7,000 secondary school students in Queensland, Australia, participating in the Our Lives research project. We do so by assessing the impact of a range of major life events during high school, such as changes in familial, social, or romantic relationships, on students’ academic achievement at the end of high school. Our results indicate that such events had a negative influence on young people’s secondary school exit scores which, at a time when university participation has become the norm in most Western societies, can adversely impact the quality and scope of young people’s post-schooling career options. We also find that this cost is distributed unevenly across the student population, with the performance of (typically wealthier) private school students, and students living in urban areas, less affected by such events than the performance of public school students and those living in non-metropolitan and regional areas. Finally, we review the implications of these findings in light of contemporary debates about individualisation, uncertainty, and inequality in young people’s educational and occupational futures.