Will You Sprint?
At the age of 18, G. Stanley Hall left his home in the tiny village of Ashfield, Mass., to enroll at Williams College, just 35 miles away, with a goal to “do something and be something in the world.” His mother wanted him to become a minister, but the young Stanley wasn’t sure about following that plan. He saw a four-year degree as a chance to explore.
Though Hall excelled as a student at Williams, his parents, who were farmers, considered his undergraduate years a bit erratic. He didn’t think he had the personal requirements for a pastor, but nonetheless enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in New York after graduation. The big city was intoxicating, and living there persuaded him to abandon his religious studies. After securing a loan, he set off for Germany to study philosophy, travel and visit the theaters, bars and dance halls of Berlin.
“What exactly are you doing over there?” his father sternly asked. Hall added physiology and physics to his academic pursuits and told his parents he was thinking about getting a Ph.D. in philosophy. “Just what is a Doctor of Philosophy?” his mother wanted to know.
His parents wanted him to come home and get a real job and even Hall, having “scarcely tried my hand in the world to know where I can do anything,” wondered what was next. He was out of money and in debt, so he returned home after his parents refused to support him any more financially. He was 27 years old.
Hall’s story is similar to that of many young Americans today. They go off to college, resist pressures to choose a job-connected major, then drift after graduation, often short of money and any real career plan. But here’s one difference: Stanley Hall grew up in a totally different America, the one of the mid-1800s.
We may think this kind of lengthy takeoff to adulthood is relatively new, but even in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the economy offered fewer career choices, there were college graduates who roamed through their third decade of life (their 20s). Hall was then an outlier, as most of his generation launched into adulthood right after high school, if they even attended. But his story might serve to lessen the anxiety of today’s parents about their own children’s long path – for some a stumble – toward independence. Stanley Hall went on to great success.
He eventually earned an advanced degree in psychology, taught at Antioch College, Harvard and Johns Hopkins and became president of Clark University in Massachusetts, where he developed a fascination with the period in life between childhood and adulthood. He founded the American Psychological Association and in 1904 wrote an influential book about a new life stage for which he invented the term “adolescence.” He described this transitional period – between ages 14 and 24 – as full of “storm and stress.”
By the 1960s, as Americans started spending more time in college, the trend of a relatively quick launch into adulthood was ending. Census figures show that the number of 19- to 24-year-olds living with their parents started edging up, from 30 percent in 1960 to 35 percent in 1980, to 47 percent in 2016.
The difference between the “boomerang generation” of the 1960s and 1970s and in 2016 is that manufacturing was – in the 1960s and 1970s – still the foundation of the economy, allowing more than one pathway to solid middle-class jobs. The 1970s marked the last full decade when a large slice of the population didn’t need a college degree for financial success.
The recession of the early 1980s effectively reduced career opportunities in manufacturing, and with the 1990’s technology revolution, the wage premium for attending college started to speed up, turning into a runaway train. In 1983, the wage premium – how much more a typical bachelor’s degree recipient earns compared to a high school graduate – was 42 percent. By 2016, it surpassed 80 percent.
The huge run-up in the number of undergraduate and graduate students – eight million more than in 1980, according to the National Center for Education statistics – has led to further delays in passing the milestones of adulthood, forever changing how we view the transition from education to the work force.
In the 1980s, college graduates achieved financial independence, defined as reaching the median wage, by the time they turned 26, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. In 2014, they didn’t hit that mark until their 30th birthday.
In the 1990s, Jeffrey Jenson Arnett, a psychology professor at the University of Missouri, interviewed young people around the country and determined that his subjects felt both grown up and not quite so grown up at exactly the same time. This led Dr. Arnett to conclude that the period between the ages of 18 and 25 was a distinct stage, separate from both adolescence and young adulthood. He defined this slice of life as “emerging adulthood,” a phrase that immediately entered the cultural lexicon, especially useful for parents trying to figure out why their children were struggling to launch into adulthood.
“Emerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible,” wrote Dr. Arnett, “when little about the future has been decided for certain, when the scope of independent exploration of life’s possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life path.”
“The biggest changes have sped up all over the world, involving the move to an information economy that requires even more education and job-hopping in one’s 20s.” said Dr. Arnett. “For today’s emerging adults, it’s how they navigate their college years that matters the most.”
In the journey to adulthood, they are either Sprinters, Wanderers or Stragglers.
SPRINTERS – READY, WILLING AND ABLE
Sprinters start fast right out of the gate. They pick a major early on and stick with it, enabling a progression of internships that look more and more impressive with each year. Some have the perfect job lined up on graduation; others are laserlike in their focus, moving from job to job while climbing the career ladder. They have little or no student-loan debt, freeing them to pick job opportunities without regard to pay.
But speed alone doesn’t define this group. Some are slow but methodical, assembling the building blocks for a successful career by investing in their own human capital, perhaps in graduate or professional school, before hitting the job market.
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 came as so many do these days, from a summer internship. The recruiter, a Georgetown alum, was impressed with her Chinese minor and high grades – signals, he told her, that she was willing to take on demanding assignments. By the end of the summer Ms. Cua was offered a full-time job, 10 months before graduation.
“It wasn’t my dream to work there,” she admitted. But she knew it would provide a launching pad. “I wanted to get skills I didn’t have coming out of college. I wanted to work with really smart people. I wanted to be mentored by someone looking out for me.”
After two years working at PricewaterhouseCoopers, she left to start a business with a college acquaintance. Their company raised over $500,000 for an online marketplace for perks and benefits employers can give their workers. Deciding to leave a Fortune 500 company was “all-consuming,” she said, but she recognized that in her early 20s, without a spouse or mortgage, it’s the best time to take career risks because it’s easy to start over again.
The possibility of starting over again makes Sprinters unafraid to change jobs frequently. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that young adults born in the early 1980s held on average, six different jobs between the ages of 18 and 26 and by their 27th birthday only 14 percent of college graduates had a job that lasted at least two years.
Such job-hopping is typically seen as a lack of commitment or direction – and it could be – but it can also boost chances for more satisfying and higher paying work in the decades that follow.
“Trying out different occupations is another reason 20-somethings need a longer runway to life’s milestones,” concludes Dr. Henry Siu, a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, part of a team of economists that examined more than 30 years of unemployment data in the U.S. In their 2014 study, the economists found that increased job mobility in one’s 20s leads to higher earnings later in life.
The reality, however, is that a growing number of emerging adults lack the financial flexibility to change jobs or to take low-paying positions that might be great starters. The problem? Student loans. Being in debt makes it harder to move from job to job for the main reasons of pursuing more interesting tasks or career opportunities. Instead, moves are focused on increasing salaries to be better able to cope with paying back student loans.
When the burden of student debt is greatly reduced or eliminated, job shifts can be based more on careers of interest both currently and as projected into the future, with opportunities to continuously expand career-related knowledge and responsibilities – not merely moving to increase your salary.
WANDERERS: ON AN UNCERTAIN PATH
For Valerie Lapointe, studying for the G.R.E., her job search had stalled so she decided to do what many recent college graduates do when they get stuck: return to school for yet another degree.
The master’s degree, with enrollments up 250% between 1980 and 2016, has become the new Bachelor’s degree. Nearly 30 percent of college graduates are back in school within two years. Graduate school gives structure and direction.
Ms. Lapointe said she had applied for jobs “from here to kingdom come. When you are unemployed, you can apply for jobs all day.” She likened her job search to dating. “You look great on paper, they interview you, but then they never call you back. You get used to the rejection.”
Ms. Lapointe grew up in the affluent suburbs of Northern Virginia. She graduated from a top-notch high school with a 3.9 grade-point average. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I went to college,” she said. Why not take a gap year? “There was never a question in my parents’ mind that I’d go directly on to college, the question was just where,” she said. “It had worked out for them, so why not me?”
Many continue to believe that a four-year college was the only pathway directly out of high school.
Wait-listed at James Madison University, Ms. Lapointe landed at the University of Mary Washington, a public college in south-central Virginia. Unsure about a major, she filled her schedule with general education courses her first two years. Then she took a journalism class, and she was hooked.
But Mary Washington didn’t have a journalism major, Ms. Lapointe found as many writing courses as she could and joined the student newspaper. She thought about transferring but was on track to finish her degree in just three years to save money.
“By the time I figured it out, it was too late,” she said.
Instead, she became a Wanderer, part of the contingent of young adults who are largely treading water in the years after college graduation. Although the unemployment rate among recent college graduates dropped in 2016 to around 4 percent from a high of 7 percent in 2011, underemployment (taking a job for which you are over-qualified) remained stubbornly high as of 2016. Nearly half of new graduates were underemployed in 2016, working jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Ms. Lapointe took a job as a nanny while living at home. By the time she started seriously looking for a job in her field of interest, a year and a half after graduation, she was already competing with the next crop of graduates. She paid to enroll in a summer program that matched her to a media internship, hoping it would lead to better employment prospects. It didn’t. A video production company laid her off after three months. She then patched together a series of jobs through temp agencies.
“I knew it would be difficult but not this difficult,” she said. Signing onto Facebook sometimes made her feel even farther behind, as friends posted the highlights of their daily lives. “I honestly believed that I’d have more of my life together by now.”
Finally, at age 25, she began a master’s program at Northwestern, with a scholarship covering half the tuition. “So now, life is good, debit is mounting and I’m hoping my job prospects will be better once I finish. I do feel far more career-minded than I did as an undergrad, and therefore in a better position to take advantage of career services and internship opportunities, and to utilize the resources a university has to offer.”
Economists conclude that the longer Wanderers drift through their 20s, the harder it becomes to catch up.
STRAGGLERS: DRIFITING THROUGH YOUR 20s.
Josh Mabry was about to turn 30. He sported a military buzz cut and forearms filled with tattoos. After a decade of dead-end jobs and false starts at a handful of colleges, he was finally settling into something he cared about: woodworking. Mr. Mabry always liked working with his hands. His father and grandfather were woodworkers. But he took his last woodshop class in seventh grade. Guidance counselors were pushing college.
After high school, he followed a girlfriend two hours from home and enrolled in graphic design classes at Lane Community College. But he fell into the party scene and dropped out. “I was drifting,” he admitted.
That defined much of the next decade for him. He tried two other community colleges, dabbling in welding and forestry. “I wanted the skill set, not the piece of paper,” he said. He took off to Central America for eight months, working bartending gigs when he returned home. Then, at 29, he saw a flyer for woodworking, metalworking and upholstery classes. He began to make wooden light fixtures and art pieces. He set up a website and now sells his products online.
“I knew that by the time I turned 30 I needed to figure something out for myself,” he said. “I finally have some sort of path.”
Many Stragglers struggle to find viable options after high school. They can stay and home and get a job (and not a very good one) or join the military. No wonder more than 95 percent of high-school seniors said in 2016 that they planned to attend college; but the year they graduate, government statistics show, about 65 percent of them do.
And if they go to college, most of them struggle to finish, or don’t at all. There are 12.5 million 20-somethings with some college credits and no degree, by far the largest share of the 31 million adults who leave college short of a degree, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. In many ways, these young adults are no better off financially than high-school graduates who never attempted college at all. Employers, after all, don’t advertise they want “some college.” Employers either require a degree or it’s not mentioned when recruiting.
The longer life expectancy for children born today means that we can chart new routes to adulthood that space out opportunities in different ways. We no longer should think of college as one physical place we go to at one time in our lives – i.e. at age 18.
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This Commentary, relevant to adult careers, was based on an article written by Jeffrey J. Selingo, published by the New York Times on April 7, 2016.
