Converging Evidence on the Links Between Early Non-Cognitive Skills and Future Adult Outcomes: Research to Inform Economic Assessment of Programs for Children

Introduction:  In recent years, much research focus has been directed toward understanding the links between non-cognitive traits in children and the likelihood of healthy personal development and eventual adult well-being.  Such traits play an important role both independently of and in conjunction with cognitive traits (such as IQ) in influencing long-term outcomes.  From an economic perspective, non-cognitive skills are worth studying given their potential role in influencing future labor force outcomes or reducing the likelihood of future problems that require societal resources (crime, substance abuse, etc.).  An additional feature of non-cognitive traits is that they may be more malleable than cognitive skills, and thus may be effective targets for prevention or intervention programming.  A challenge lies in effectively assessing children’s competencies at an early enough age when such efforts might be introduced but also when such skills can be gauged.  Our study investigated how well adult outcomes can be predicted from ratings of children’s social-emotional (SE) skills, one indicator of non-cognitive ability, measured many years earlier in elementary school. We examined how early SE skills predict late adolescent and adult outcomes in participants from lower SES neighborhoods in both urban and rural areas               

Method: Our analytic models were used to assess the links between indicators in early elementary school and economically-relevant outcomes 13-19 years later.  Models included a large number of control variables enabling us to explore the unique determination of featured predictors.  We utilized data from three intervention projects: the Fast Track Study, the Child Development Project, and the Chicago Longitudinal Study.  Indices representing early SE skills were created by combining across individual scales and across multiple ages of data, in order to represent multiple facets of non-cognitive ability.

Results: Results indicate how early SE skills are uniquely predictive of adult outcomes across multiple domains such as crime, employment, educational attainment and future need for public assistance.  Outcomes with significant prediction from early non-cognitive ability include likelihood to graduate from high school on time, likelihood for stable full-time employment, and number of adult arrests. 

Conclusion: Such data that are rich in coverage of early non-cognitive skills as well as adult outcomes many years later can provide important information that may facilitate development of shadow prices for use in economic assessment of programs for children.   I will discuss the implications of these findings for helping determine shadow prices that are useful in economic evaluation of early childhood programs.