MORE PRAISE FOR
NOT QUITE ADULTS
“There are three huge strengths that set this book apart from anything else available on the transition to adulthood. First, it is written in a lively and jargon-free style by two rare social scientists who are familiar with the English language. Second, its scope is stunning, including challenges to becoming an adult created by dramatic changes in education, relations between young adults and parents, marriage and its precursors, civic life, and the world of work. Third, the tone is relentlessly upbeat about the advantages these changes are opening up for young people. This book proves that it is possible to write an interesting book about a big social problem that reflects research knowledge while nonetheless being accessible to the American public.”
—RON HASKINS, co-director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families
“One of the most important functions of social science research is to raise the quality of public debate by challenging myth, conjecture, and sensationalism with empirical realities. This book does just that by presenting an integrated social map of young adulthood in twenty-first-century America that is grounded in a diverse body of research.”
—JAMES GARBARINO, PH.D., Loyola University Chicago, author of Children and the Dark Side of Human Experience
“Amid all the outcry over young people stuck in adultolescence and failing to launch comes this sensible portrait of a generation of almost-adults. Based on empirical research, and not hand-wringing punditry, Settersten and Ray reveal a new stage of development that slows the clock, but does not stop it, making slower, but steady progress to more durable relationships and stable social networks.”
—MICHAEL KIMMEL, professor of sociology, SUNY Stony Brook, author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
“The rulebook has changed; the good ol’ days of a universally accepted school-work-family-retirement fast track are gone. Despite mainstream media’s attempt to portray 20-somethings as a group of lazy, no-good slackers, Not Quite Adults uncovers the real story—how a slower, more calculated transition into adulthood often makes more sense and leads to a better future for us all.”
—SEAN AIKEN, author of The One-Week Job Project
“A provocative look at how a changing reality is transforming the transition to adulthood for a generation of Americans, and the implications of this transformation in today’s competitive world.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Aside from enjoying a panoramic perspective on one generation, readers will be able to glean tips on everything from dating to parenting from this admirably lucid and fair-minded study that, in describing what is happening, reveals what is working.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Not Quite Adults is perhaps the most important contribution to date about the strange new life of America’s twenty-somethings. Settersten and Ray are able to combine a deep grasp of the research with commonsense advice for ‘not quite adults’ and their parents. The slower path to adulthood is here to stay; thanks to the authors, we are now much wiser about what that means for all of us.”
—KAY HYMOWITZ, author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys and contributing editor for City Journal
“Based on interviews with 500 young adults and extensive research, this outstanding book offers a fresh and compelling view of why it is taking this generation longer to make career and family decisions. The message here is about the value of ‘slowing down,’ and it makes sense not just for young adults, but also for their parents and educators, who are ‘fast-tracking children’ into a lengthy period of being nearly, but not quite, adults. Learn about today’s young adults, why they are making the life choices they are, and why we should feel good about it.”
—BARBARA SCHNEIDER, author of The Ambitious Generation, John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University
A Bantam Books Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Settersten, Jr., and Barbara Ray
All rights reserved.
Cover design: Georgia Feldman
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33979-3
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
More Praise for Not Quite Adults
Title Page
Copyright
MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy
Introduction
1. Education, Education, Education
2. Financing a Future
3. Job-Hopping or Job-Shopping in a Do-It-Yourself Economy
4. First Comes Love, Then Comes …?
5. The Unlonely Crowd: Friends and Social Networks
6. The Parent–Child Lifeline
7. iDecide: Voting and Volunteering in a Digital World
8. Converging Destinies: Prescriptions for Change
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Authors
MacArthur Research Network
on Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy
Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., PhD, network director, University of Pennsylvania
Gordon Berlin, PhD, MDRC
Mark Courtney, PhD, University of Washington
Sheldon Danziger, PhD, University of Michigan
Connie A. Flanagan, PhD, Pennsylvania State University
Vonnie C. McLoyd, PhD, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
D. Wayne Osgood, PhD, Pennsylvania State University
Jean E. Rhodes, PhD, University of Massachusetts–Boston
Cecilia E. Rouse, PhD, Princeton University
Rubén G. Rumbaut, PhD, University of California–Irvine
Richard A. Settersten, Jr., PhD, Oregon State University
Mary Waters, PhD, Harvard University
Barbara Ray, Hiredpen, Inc., communications director
Patricia Miller, University of Pennsylvania, administrator
Associate Members
Thomas Brock, PhD, MDRC
Patrick Carr, PhD, Rutgers University
Colleen Dillon, PhD, University of Washington
E. Michael Foster, PhD, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
Elizabeth Fussell, PhD, Washington State University
Douglas Hartmann, PhD, University of Minnesota
Jennifer Holdaway, PhD, Social Science Research Council
Maria Kefalas, PhD, St. Joseph’s University
Teresa Swartz, PhD, University of Minnesota
Introduction
There was a time not so long ago when a popular high school graduation gift was a suitcase. Not for nothing, this gift. It marked the young person as a newly minted member of the adult clan, bound for independence and autonomy. Armed with a wallet full of small bills from family, friends, and neighbors, and either a dictionary for college or a pair of new work boots for the factory floor, high school graduates set off to conquer the world with their suitcases in tow.
Young adults once hit the road on a clearly marked path. The first stop was college, some training, or the military. Next up was a job. Marriage followed, and then children. Between marriage and kids, the new family bought a home. All of this was accomplish
ed by age twenty-five—and often in that order. There would be exceptions and a few detours for some, but for the majority, the gap between the end of adolescence and the embrace of adulthood was short and sweet. This sprint was not confined to the halcyon days of the 1950s. The suitcase and the quick ticket to independence were alive and well for the high school class of 1980.
From the vantage point of parents and eighteen-year-olds today, this beeline to adulthood is unfathomable. Move out? Who can afford it? A college degree and a job by age twenty-one—no way. Marriage and kids by twenty-five? Unheard of. Today, one-half of those between eighteen and twenty-four have not left their childhood bedrooms, let alone landed a job, married, or had children of their own. This is a 37 percent increase over 1970. And an even bigger jump in living at home has occurred for those ages twenty-five through thirty-four—a 139 percent increase since 1970. Some of these young people never left the nest, and others have boomeranged back. Regardless, this sizable increase is a strong clue to how much the transition into adulthood is stretching. Today’s graduation gift might as well be a GPS device, because the signposts on the road to adulthood seem to have all but vanished.
What happened? If we’re to believe the media, these changes are the result of too much coddling and too few hard knocks. Spoiled and indulged at every turn, today’s young adults are a generation of stunted Peter Pans dodging the serious business of adulthood. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t pay twenty-somethings to live at home with their parents, even if it meant renting roach-infested apartments and eating ramen noodles every day. They sucked it up, cut corners, and survived. Today, some young people are staying at home past their thirtieth birthdays.
But a peek under the rug of easy anecdote reveals a much more complex story, a story we tell in this book. The media and others may paint today’s young adults as spoiled slackers, implicitly blaming parents for their children’s failure to launch. But the real story lies largely elsewhere, in a host of changes that today affect how young adults think about education, work, love, home, and country. Like the butterfly that flaps its wings in Indonesia, causing a thunderstorm to erupt in New York, the events and upheavals of the past few decades have unleashed a perfect storm just as this generation’s high school graduates were poised to launch themselves onto the tried-and-true road to adulthood. These forces have shredded the old rule book for when to leave home, how long to spend in college, and when to marry and settle down. The new rule book, meanwhile, is still being written, leaving much ambiguity and uncertainty for young people and their families as they try to make their way. It is a particularly perilous time for those least prepared to compete in this high-stakes world.
In the pages that follow, we dispel many misperceptions about young adults, and in so doing we hope to change the conversations we have with our children and one another about these longer and less direct routes to adulthood. Many parents privately feel a sense of failure as they are bombarded with the negative news stories and stereotypes about their children’s generation. They feel as if they have somehow failed in a critical role of parenting—preparing their children to leave the nest. They look inward at their parenting styles, wondering if they have been too indulgent, feeling guilty that they still have such close relationships with their adult children, or that their adult children feel no compunction about returning home. Books such as The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization by Diana West have only fueled this sense by setting their sights directly on parents, accusing them of abdicating adulthood in favor of their own perpetual youth, and for making child rearing a “no bad guy” experience. The result, these books argue, is a generation of young people—and parents—who refuse to grow up.
What the actual research shows, however, may ease some of the guilt and shame parents may feel and open their eyes to the new world of the twenties that their children are attempting to navigate. With new insights, we hope parents can begin to shape new strategies for helping their children, or at least better understand why their children are doing adulthood so differently today. We hope, too, to offer guidance to young people, who are themselves anxious about their futures and the heaviness of their choices.
We also want to bring to focus another little-remarked but alarming trend: the sharply diverging destinies among young people. One group of young adults is taking their time launching into adulthood, but doing so in a careful and calculated way. They are gaining a good education, getting the building blocks in place for a successful career, and putting off marriage and children until they get their lives in order. They may be doing a leisurely backstroke, but they are headed in the right direction.
A second and much larger group is in a more worrisome position. This group of young adults is treading water instead of swimming because they have embraced the responsibilities of adulthood too quickly, without being adequately prepared for today’s competitive world. These treaders often skip or struggle with the most crucial step in the transition to adulthood: education. To give a sense of the size of this group: Approximately 70 percent of those ages eighteen through thirty-four in 2005 had less than an associate’s degree. Treaders may try to go on for some additional schooling, but, lacking the skills or direction, their stuttering course through higher education takes much longer than normal or ends in failure. With few credentials, they quickly find that the workforce has little to offer them. They often start families early and find they must defer or abandon important life dreams once children arrive. These young people may have tried to mimic their parents’ quick paths to adulthood, only to find that following these models today makes it much harder to get a secure start in life.
This is not a group confined to the ranks of the poor; these kids are from both middle-class and working-class families. They are the kids in our classrooms and offices. They are the kids who live next door. They are the children of our friends. They are our own children. Their well-being, and our country’s, is at stake. If too many treaders ultimately sink rather than swim, the nation’s progress will be severely compromised. When approximately two-thirds of the next generation of workers, parents, and taxpayers is, because of a lack of higher education, at risk of not finding a secure foothold into the middle class, we will all pay the price. The future rests on the fates of these young people. We shine a spotlight on this large and overlooked group, and explain how the starkly divergent destinies between swimmers and treaders come about and the serious consequences they bring for young people, our families, and our nation.
Slaying Misperceptions
We follow these new paths into adulthood by looking at how the traditional milestones of “adulthood” have changed and why. We shadow this generation at college and at work. We examine their debts and finances and their road to relationships, cohabitation, and marriage. We underscore the increasing significance of friends as young people delay marriage and live independently for longer. Finally, we look at their civic lives as they become the next generation of voters, community volunteers, and citizens. Along the way, we slay the many myths about this generation.
Take work: A common misperception about young adults is that they have lost their work ethic; they want to make it big without paying their dues. It is true that in this world of tenuous jobs, where brains have replaced brawn and loyalty is defunct, young adults are leery of promising their futures to one employer. They are also wary of sinking their entire lives into a job. As a result, they change jobs frequently. Yet where some see a self-indulged, entitled worker, we see an adaptive response (with a small dose of self-entitlement) to a gutted workforce. In this downsized and globalized economy, job-hopping is not necessarily a sign of restlessness or fickleness. It is a smart professional strategy for the well credentialed. It is job-shopping. However, in a knowledge economy, swimmers are better positioned to negotiate than treaders. For those without credentials, job-hopping is done less by choice than by force. This group’s moves are often not to higher-payin
g jobs, and they are in no position to bargain. The economy makes that choice for them.
Those with the luxury of choice in the workforce are those with education. Never before has education so determined the destinies of young people. College is for all, our society tells us, and we harbor the (mistaken) perception that most children are college-bound—or, more accurately, college-prepared. While nearly everyone today aspires to a college degree, nearly half of those who do manage to enroll drop out within six years. This generation has heard the message that college is a must, but many walk through college doors with plans that are surprisingly half-baked or without the necessary skills to make it. A select minority has been cultivated from day one to succeed in college, and succeed they do. Yet the majority flounders badly on the path through higher education, and more often than not they drop out or flunk out—a critical misstep in this high-stakes knowledge economy.
The lack of education often leads these young people along a path of financial insecurity. Before the current financial crisis, which put everyone’s spending on display, young adults were often singled out by the media for their profligate ways. If it wasn’t their shopping habits that felled them, it was their crushing college debt, or so the story went. Yet we have uncovered a different story, one that once again underscores the diverging destinies of swimmers and treaders. Debt is not the main reason young adults are failing to launch. In fact, not taking on debt is sinking the futures of many young adults. Fearful of the burden of college loans, they are underinvesting in themselves at this critical time, letting their immediate worries compromise their long-term security. The average college debt today is the equivalent of a car loan, and yet the return to that degree has rarely been greater. Not taking on college debt in this knowledge economy is a costly decision. That is not to say that debt should be taken on willy-nilly. Being strategic is key to getting ahead. Some young adults are actually going overboard in their quest for a gold-plated degree when a public university offers a fine education. Indeed, there is little evidence that lifetime earnings are as significantly affected by where one goes to college as much as having the degree in hand.
Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone Page 1
