STANLEY HALL GREW UP IN THE TINY VILLAGE OF ASHFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS, NEAR THE FOOTHILLS OF THE BERKSHIRE MOUNTAINS IN THE NORTHWEST corner of the state. At age eighteen, he left home for Williams College, just thirty-five miles away, with a goal to âdo something and be something in the world.â His parents were farmers. His mother, Abigail, wanted her son to become a minister, but young Stanley wasnât sure about that plan. He had different ideas about college; he saw the four-year degree as a rite of passageâa chance to follow his passions and to explore.
Though Stanley excelled academically at Williamsâhe was voted smartest in his classâhis parents considered his undergraduate years a bit erratic. When he graduated from college, he told his mom he didnât think he had the ârequirements for a pastor.â Even so, he moved to New York City and enrolled in a seminary.
The big city was intoxicating, and living there persuaded Stanley to abandon his religious studies short of a degree, and at the age of twenty-five, after securing a loan, he set off for Germany to study philosophy. While there, Stanley traveled extensively, visiting the theaters, bars, and dance halls of Berlin.
âWhat exactly are you doing over there?â his father sternly asked him.
He added physiology and physics to his academic pursuits and told his parents he was thinking about getting a Ph.D. in philosophy. His mother questioned the benefit of a Ph.D. âJust what is a Doctor of Philosophy?â she asked.
His parents wanted him to come home and get a real job, and even Stanley wondered what was next. He felt he was drifting through his twenties.
âI am twenty-five and have done nothing for myself, scarcely tried my hand in the world to know where I can do anything,â he told his parents. But he continued his studies and explored Germany for a few more years. By then, Stanley was out of money, in debt, and without an advanced degree, so he returned home to the United States after his parents refused to support him financially. He was twenty-seven years old.
The Ever-Lengthening Road to Adulthood
STANLEY HALLâS STORY IS SIMILAR TO THAT OF MANY young Americans today. They go off to college, resist their parentsâ pressures to choose a job-connected major, and then drift through the years after college graduation, often short of money or any real plan. But hereâs the difference: Stanley Hall grew up in a totally different Americaâthe one of the late 1800s.
We think this kind of lengthy takeoff is a relatively new situation for parents, but itâs not. Sure, the timetable to adulthood is definitely longer now than ever before and affects far more people, but even at the turn of the twentieth century, when the economy offered fewer career choices for people like Hall and far fewer had college degrees, young people still roamed around throughout their twenties.
Hall eventually started a careerâhe earned an advanced degree, taught at Antioch College and Harvard University, married in his midthirties, and became president of Clark University in Massachusetts. While at Clark, he developed a fascination with the period in life between childhood and adulthood. He founded the American Psychological Association, and in the early 1900s, he wrote an influential book that coined a new life stage that he called âadolescence.â
Hall described this transitional period from childhood to adulthood, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, as being full of âstorm and stress.â Industrialization and automation, along with child labor laws, meant that teenagers no longer had to work in the factories or on the farms. And the emergence of the high school movement in the United States required children to acquire more education before entering the workforce.
In reality, the adolescent stage in the early 1900s was much shorter than Hall described. Employers didnât demand that most teenagers go to college, so they were able to get a solid full-time job after graduating from high school, followed quickly by marriage and parenthood. Then around the middle of the last century, the job market began requiring that more young Americans add a college degree to the equation. The timetable to adulthood lengthened to the middle of a personâs twenties, although it was still short by todayâs standards.
After World War II, the GI Bill allowed returning veterans, mostly men, to go to college for free, and the fast-growing postwar workforce quickly absorbed them. They got married, bought houses in the developing suburbs, and had kids, achieving all those key milestones in their twenties. Between 1950 and 1960, the percentage of men nineteen to twenty-four years old living with their parents fell by half.
That postâWorld War II era cemented in our minds an idea that remains to this day: teenagers graduate from high school, earn a college degree, secure a job, and move out of their childhood homeâall by the age of twenty-two or so. But the 1950s turned out to be an anomaly in a century-long extension of the timetable to adulthood. World War II forced many adolescents, drafted to serve, to grow up before they were really ready to be adults; the GI Bill made it easy and cheap to go to college; and companies were quick to hire a new crop of college-educated veterans, as the United States faced little global competition from countries still rebuilding from the war.
Yet by the 1960s, the trend of a quick launch to adulthood was ending, and by the 1970s, young twentysomethings started living with their parents in larger numbers. In other words, the âboomerang generation,â named for college graduates who return home to live with their parents today, existed forty years ago, too. It was just much smaller.
The difference between then and now is that manufacturing was still the foundation of the U.S. economy. In 1970, factory work accounted for 25 percent of jobs nationwide (compared with 10 percent today). Even in the bad economy of the 1970s, a college degree wasnât necessary for financial success, allowing more than one pathway to solid middle-class jobs for most young people. At that time, the wage premium for a college degreeâhow much more the typical bachelorâs degree recipient earned compared with a high school graduateâwas below 40 percent. In 1976, Newsweek ran a cover story asking âWho Needs College?â with a picture of two college graduates in their caps and gowns on a construction site with a jackhammer and a shovel, suggesting that as much as â27 percent of the nationâs work force may now be made up of people who are âovereducatedâ for the jobs they hold.â
But the 1970s marked the last full decade when a large slice of the population didnât need a college degree. The recession of the early 1980s effectively killed off manufacturing in the United States, and the next decadeâs technology revolution essentially mandated education after high school. The economic benefits of World War II had finally ended. The increase in the wage premium started to speed up for college graduates, and after 1983, it turned into a runaway train. In 1983, the wage premium was 42 percent. Today, it surpasses 80 percent.
The high school movement of the early 1900s, which brought about the new life stage of adolescence, turned into the universal college movement as we neared the end of the twentieth century. College did not become that much more valuable, but the loss of many blue-collar jobs caused the high school diploma to become much less valuable. More education was necessary in a knowledge economy, and acquiring that education required a longer timetable between adolescence and adulthood. Beginning in 1980, the next three decades would see a massive run-up in the number of students enrolled in college (both undergraduate and graduate students), leading to further delays in passing the milestones of adulthood, from marriage to buying a house, and forever changing how we view what had been a predictable transition from education to the workforce.
The Three Pathways to a Career
TODAY, THOSE IN THEIR LATE TEENS AND EARLY TWENTIES donât seem to fit either the traditional definition of adolescent or young adult. They are living in more of an in-between period.
In the 1990s, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor at the University of Missouri, interviewed young people around the country and determined that his interview subjects felt both grown-up and not-quite-so-grown-up at exactly the same time. This led Arnett to conclude that this period between ages eighteen and twenty-five was a distinct stage separate from both adolescence and young adulthood. In 2000, he published a paper conceiving a new term for this slice of life: âemerging adulthood.â
âEmerging adults often explore a variety of possible life directions in love, work, and world views,â Arnett wrote at the time. âEmerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when little about the future has been decided for certain, when the scope of independent exploration of lifeâs possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course.â
The phrase âemerging adultsâ immediately entered the cultural lexicon, especially for parents trying to figure out why their children were struggling to launch into adulthood. It was cited thousands of times by the media and other academics. Arnett wrote several books on the subject and became a sought-after speaker by educators and corporate executives trying to understand young people, millennials in particular.
By the time I caught up with Arnett in 2014, he had moved to Clark University, the same campus in Massachusetts where Stanley Hall had ended up as president in the early 1900s. Fourteen years after Arnett coined the term, I was curious to hear whether the journey to adulthood was getting even longer for the emerging adults of this decade. âAbsolutely,â he told me. Arnett said he had deliberately avoided using generational terms to describe what those in their late teens and early twenties were undergoing âbecause the changes that are happening are permanent structural changes that have only sped up all over the world.â
This stuttering route to adulthood is now the new normal for most kids, transcending generations and occurring regardless of the economyâs health. The stark reality hasnât totally discouraged this generation of emerging adults, however. Indeed, they have come to accept it as part of their lives. In his research, Arnett found emerging adults to be a largely optimistic bunch. Nearly 90 percent of those eighteen to twenty-nine years old told Clark University pollsters in 2012âin the midst of a global economic slowdownâthey were confident they would eventually get what they wanted out of life. Another 83 percent said they believed âanything is possible.â This optimism made them feel they could take their time in finding the right career niche without becoming cynical about the world or worrying about providing for a family.
When it came to the subject of education after high school, however, emerging adults and those who had recently moved into adulthood appeared much more unsettled. They definitely wanted to further their education but were not quite sure how to pay for it. Nearly six in ten people twenty-five to thirty-nine years old surveyed by Arnett in 2014âa group he called âestablished adultsââsaid they wished they had completed more years of education to move up in their careers. Another 70 percent in that poll expected to go back to school at some point, although some 40 percent were unable to get the credentials they needed because of a lack of money.
Arnett told me that for todayâs emerging adults, a college educationâand not just going to college but actually earning a degreeâis the biggest determinant of whether twentysomethings launch into a sustaining career or not. Heâs certainly not alone in believing that. In the last decade, scores of economists, sociologists, and psychologists alike have described the critical role a college degree plays in the divergent paths young adults eventually take.
Thatâs still true. But itâs not just the college degree that separates the successful from the drifters these days. If that were the case, recent college graduates wouldnât be standing in the unemployment line or settling for jobs that donât require a bachelorâs degree. While some sort of degree after high school remains the foundation of a successful life and career, other coming-of-age, real-world experiences in the late teens and early twentiesâparticularly apprenticeships, jobs, or internshipsâactually matter more nowadays in moving from college to a career.
Todayâs emerging adults make that transition in one of three ways: they are either Sprinters, Wanderers, or Stragglers in the race to adulthood.
THE SPRINTERS:
Investments in Human Capital Pay Off
The Sprinters by their nature start fast right out of the gate from college. Some have the perfect job lined up, and others are laser-like in their focus, moving from job to job quickly up the career ladder. But speed alone doesnât define this group. Some are slow but methodical, assembling the building blocks for a successful career early on, mostly by going to graduate or professional school and investing more in their own human capital before hitting the job market. Others collect the right internships and postgraduate experiences, which add key markers to their rĂ©sumĂ©s so they are ready to pounce when the right opportunity comes along.
While we imagine this is how most graduates should start out, only one-third of twentysomethings are Sprinters, according to a survey of 752 young adults ages twenty-four to twenty-seven conducted for this book (see full results in the appendix). They are not defined by one set of qualities, but many I met, and those in the survey, share several attributes. They had a job in high school (even at minimum wage) and understand the nuances and basic requirements of the workplace (such as showing up on time). They picked a major early on in college and stuck with it. This allowed them to dedicate time to outside-the-classroom pursuits, such as research projects or internships (79 percent had at least one internship in college, according to my own survey).
They also have little or no student loan debt, freeing them to pick job opportunities without regard to pay (my survey found 33 percent had less than $10,000 of debt). Whether they went to an elite or not-so-selective college, most came from families willing to support themâmany with financial help, others with simple encouragementâas they landed on their feet in their early twenties.
Lily Cua is a classic Sprinter. Well before she got her degree in finance from Georgetown University, she secured a plum position as a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers. The job emerged like so many do these days, from a summer internship at the firm. She had applied for the internship her junior year as a way to practice her interviewing skills. The recruiter, a Georgetown alumnus,...
