This article argues for the importance of replication and data sharing in educational research. Relying on standards set in other disciplines, such as sociology, the paper discusses how professional associations can help to create norms and incentives for data sharing and data archiving.

In the following pages, we will argue that understanding the selective processes through which young people now enter the labor market requires two kinds of information. First, we must describe the opportunities to work that are available to these young people as they move through high school and postsecondary education. Second, we must discover how, given their opportunities, they act to form their own occupational trajectories or job histories.

In this chapter, we examine the changing nature of the transition from high school to work and college in the United States. Our focus is the period between 1972 and 1994. \¥e begin by describing the changing macro context of the transition from high school--the wages of high school graduates, their educational and occupational ambitions, the cost of college, and changes in the curriculum of the high school. We then examine the changing profiles of high school students who go to work immediately after high school and of those who enter college and describe advantages in strengthening the linkages between high school and work and college. We conclude by examining several current policy initiatives and how these initiatives could affect the transition from high school.

This research brief examines the gender gap in specific STEM majors among college sophomores and whether this gap varies across institutions of different selectivity. Using national longitudinal data, results show that women’s underrepresentation on STEM is solely driven by the field of physics, mathematics, engineering, and computer science (PEMC) and that the gender gap in this particular STEM field is ubiquitous across institutions of different selectivity levels. Men are three to four times more likely to major in PEMC even when comparing males and females scoring at the top of the SATs, who have a positive orientation toward math, and are enrolled at highly selective institutions.