The rollout of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in 2010 began as a widely applauded, bipartisan policy aimed at providing an accessible curriculum focused on conceptual understanding that could form the foundation for K–12 education content for the next generation. When the rubber hit the road, however, it faced a lot criticism from parents, educators, and policymakers alike—some fair, some not.
A new study by Dong Woo Hahm, professor of Economics at the University of Southern California, sidesteps the question of popularity. Given that enough time has passed for students exposed to CCSS to enter the labor market, he focuses instead on CCSS’s impact on students’ labor market outcomes. The paper examines whether those in their late 20’s and early 30’s at present were better off if their states adopted CCSS in time for them to be exposed to it.
This subset of adults was chosen because their exposure to the Common Core as children depended on if and when their state adopted the standards. So some in this cohort were only exposed to CCSS for their senior year, some were exposed for several years, and some not at all. The key dataset used in this study is the American Community Survey. This is a repeated cross-sectional dataset, with the study designers at the U.S. Census sampling a different nationally representative group of American adults each year.
The main finding is that exposure to just one additional year of CCSS is associated with a $112 increase in annual wages. Mind you, this is using 2010 dollars in a sample of young adults earning an average of $27,000 per year, meaning exposure to CCSS throughout high school would predict a 1.7 percent increase in income a decade later. This is still a small change in one’s income, but the fact that this paper shows any kind of connection between states’ adoption of CCSS and eventual labor market outcomes for students is certainly noteworthy.
A few other noteworthy details about this main finding: First, these earning gains were mostly captured by women rather than men. They are also partially due to workers’ willingness to spend a few more hours on the job throughout the year. These earning gains were also highest in states that formally mandated full K–12 implementation in both math and English language arts. Also of interest is that Hahm broke out his estimates based on how we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute rated state curriculum quality in the runup to the launch of the CCSS. This revealed that these earning gains were concentrated in states with subpar pre-CCSS curricular standards, presumably because CCSS curriculum represented a more substantial improvement relative to the status quo.
The positive effect on income was not, however, the result of students going to get more education or by steering students towards STEM fields. Instead, the explanation seems to be that CCSS exposure led some to be “less likely to work in sectors characterized by manual, highly routine labor, or basic production, while being more likely to enter [non-STEM] jobs emphasizing non-routine cognitive tasks, communication, and interpersonal coordination.”
This finding may be disheartening for those who extol the value of a career in the trades. But this style of difference-in-difference study is rather convincing. It is not perfect and is far from definitive, but it deserved to be published, and its results should be taken seriously. The author’s key claim is that CCSS nudged some students towards jobs where they use their hands a bit less and their brains a bit more and raised incomes as a result. It is one more piece of evidence that the Common Core should be seen as a success despite its many discontents.
My biggest gripe with the paper is the lack of detail about the variation in this cohort’s exposure to CCSS. Did anyone in the study get the Common Core in middle school, as well as high school? Hahm never says. That aside, this article left me hoping for more: more research on the long-term effects of Common Core and also research on labor market impact of curriculum reforms that have happened since.
SOURCE: Dong Woo Hahm, “From curriculum to career: Early-career labor market effects of the Common Core,” Economics of Education Review, Volume 110, February 2026.
