James Rosenbaum

Professor of Sociology, Education and Social Policy
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University
Ph.D., Sociology, Harvard University, 1973
j-rosenbaum@northwestern.edu
Additional biographical information

For the past two decades, James Rosenbaum has conducted an extensive research project on the effects of relocating poor inner-city black families in public housing to subsidized housing in the white middle-class suburbs of Chicago. This quasi-natural experiment, known as the Gautreaux Program, has enabled him to study the effects of these moves on children's educational outcomes and job opportunities, as well as the social and economic effects on the mothers.

These studies encouraged the federal government to create its Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, now being implemented by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, to which he serves as a consultant. A specialist in research on work, education, and housing opportunities, Rosenbaum has published four books and numerous articles on these subjects. In related work, Rosenbaum studied the effects of a mixed-income housing project, Lake Parc Place in Chicago, on adult employment and children's education, among other outcomes. The project also analyzed how the Chicago Housing Authority designed and implemented the program and its impact on the surrounding neighborhood.

Rosenbaum's second major area of research concerns the high school to work transition and linkages among students, schools, and employers. He currently is focusing on the ties between employers and community colleges. Rosenbaum has testified before Congressional committees on several occasions. He serves as an adviser to the U.S. Office of Educational Research and Improvement. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the W.T. Grant Foundation's Commission on Youth and America's Future.

Recent and Current Projects

The Gautreaux Housing Relocation Project. Rosenbaum has been studying the effects of the Gautreaux public housing relocation program in Chicago since 1981. The program has assisted some 7,000 low-income black families in moving from public housing in the city to predominantly white middle-class suburbs or to other low-income neighborhoods in the city. It has become a model for similar programs in Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas and Hartford, Conn., and inspired the national MTO program in five U.S. cities. In a series of studies that compared outcomes for the suburban and city movers, Rosenbaum’s research team found significantly more suburban movers had jobs, and significantly more youth were enrolled in college tracks and went on to college. Furthermore, a higher proportion of youth who went into the labor market had full-time jobs at higher wages and better benefits than those who remained in the city. Rosenbaum is currently engaged in a three-year follow-up survey with a targeted sample of 1,000 families and 3,000 youth to determine the longer range effects of their relocation.

Long-Term Outcomes. In a related project, Rosenbaum and economist Greg Duncan are analyzing labor market outcomes for some Gautreaux mothers and school and early career experiences of their children, with a special focus on the effects of the characteristics of the original destination neighborhoods on these outcomes. They are supplementing previously collected survey results with new state administrative data on outcomes and a more complete characterization of the initial neighborhood to which the families relocated. Key outcomes will include enrollment of children in special education programs, welfare receipt, and census-based demographic characteristics of their most recent neighborhoods. These new data will enable them to weigh the impact of various characteristics of neighborhoods, such as poverty, crime, male joblessness and access to public transportation.

Employers and Community Colleges. This three-year project looks at the hiring process from the vantage points of both employers and educators. Rosenbaum focuses on two questions: How do employers view community colleges? Which programs help students complete their degrees and get earnings benefits when they graduate? The researchers are interviewing administrators and staff at 12 urban and suburban schools to determine how the schools prepare students for various occupations and how they learn about employers’ needs, disseminate information to firms, and help their graduates get jobs. Data from 1,200 students will shed light on their education and work training, and their career expectations. Local employers will be asked how they get information about school programs, how they decide whether these programs meet their needs, and whether they influence curricula. Employers’ views of programs including distance-education and use of the Internet also will be sought.

The High-School-to-Work Transition. From a sample of 500 U.S. high schools, Rosenbaum is pinpointing various links between school and work and their impact on employers, teachers, and students, especially low-income and minority youth. His research team is also interviewing school personnel and students in 12 high schools with different types of linkages to employers. They are analyzing reform experiments that use these arrangements to improve the motivation of work-bound students.

Selected Publications

Books

After Admission: From College Access to College Success (with Regina Deil-Amen). New York: Russell Sage Foundation, (2006).

Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half. New York: Russell Sage Foundation (2001).

Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbia (with Leonard S. Rubinowitz) . University of Chicago Press (2000).

Published Papers

"Can residential mobility help people leave welfare? Lessons from the Gautreaux Program." Brookings Institution Survey Series, September 2000 (with Stefanie DeLuca).

"Housing programs can do more than provide shelter: They can radically improve lives." Boston Review, Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer 2000, pp. 16-17.

"Interactions between high schools and labor markets" (with Stephanie A. Jones). Handbook of Sociology of Education. New York: Plenum (2000).

"Is integration possible? Institutional strategies to facilitate integration." Poverty and Race, Vol. 8, No. 6, December 1999.

"Institutional networks and informal strategies for improving work-entry for youth," in Education and Work in a Comparative Perspective, ed. Walter Heinz. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (1999), pp. 235-259.

"If tracking is bad, is detracking better? A study of a detracked high school. American Educator, Winter 1999, pp. 24-47.

"College-for-all: Do students understand what college demands?" Social Psychology of Education (1998).

"Lake Parc Place: A study of mixed-income housing" (with Linda Stroh and Cathy Flynn). Housing Policy Debate 9, 4 (Winter, 1998): 703-740.