Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone

by Settersten, Richard; Ray, Barbara E.

  Facebook also feeds the cause-oriented urge of this generation. Many causes on Facebook are frivolous or satiric: “Make St. George’s Day a Bank Holiday!” Or the “Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too.” Others are more serious—the top cause by sheer numbers is the “Support the O Campaign for Cancer Prevention,” which claims 4.4 million members, while “Save Darfur” has more than one million members.

  Despite their popularity, though, these causes rarely raise much money. The Save Darfur campaign on Facebook has raised an average of about two cents for every member—hardly enough funding to support their efforts. Young adults are at an interesting intersection of commerce and cause. Not surprisingly, marketers have caught wind of the huge potential to “speak to” a generation motivated by causes. They have convinced young people to equate consumerism with charity—a nifty trick. Buy a Gap T-shirt and save a child in Africa. Buy a certain shoe and contribute $5 to the environment. “Buycotting” has replaced boycotting, the old stalwart of their parents’ generation.

  “Today,” explains Jonathan, “we shop at stores that give 1 percent of their proceeds to a cause, and that’s how we’re engaged. We shop at Whole Foods and buy organic eggs not because we love or even know any small farmers, but because we have a general social conscience. Through these efforts, we’ve slowed the rise of sweatshops. Walmart is buying cage-free eggs. That’s a big thing. I prefer to give my business to someone who is going to do something mildly better. It’s one of those no-effort things.”

  No effort—that’s the bottom line. It is easy to click. It is easy to buy a Gap T-shirt. But converting those clicks into action is what worries many organizations and activists schooled in the old way of politics by protest.

  Luke is frustrated with how superficial so many causes are. When asked whether he’s involved in any civic activity online, he laughs. “You know, I’m a member of the group on Facebook called ‘I Have More Foreign Policy Experience than Sarah Palin.’ Okay, it’s funny, but it’s a pretty meaningless section of Facebook, right?”

  A click can only get you so far. “You can probably feel too good about a click,” says Tom Watson. “It doesn’t mean that much at this stage.” A click doesn’t yet embody real change, which requires significant investments of time and resources. A click doesn’t require deeper knowledge and understanding, which are necessary for real change. A click allows young people to feel good without the “opportunity cost” of actually acting—a much harder thing. Yet it is a start. It was, after all, the method that allowed Obama to shatter fund-raising records $10 at a time.

  With careful thought and planning, social networking and digital media can help elevate causes to more than a mere click. When organizers stay out of the way and let young adults pass the message along, the odds that young people will stand up and be counted is greater. The digital tools and causes that inspire this generation could be the hook that convinces more young people to become active, participating citizens. These tools and this new model of participation also hold promise for drawing in those who often feel left out of the conversation.

  Across the Great (College) Divide

  Jacquie, Jonathan, and Luke all share one thing in common: They are attending or have graduated from college. They are involved, albeit in different ways from the past. Whether their involvement is “meaningful,” from the perspective of old-school protesters, is a question that will continue to be debated. However, they believe in their causes. Too many young people do not, and the majority of those who are not involved are those who, like Sherri, have chosen not to pursue a college degree or education after high school. Young people without college experience are two times less likely to join in, either voting or donating to a campaign, volunteering or participating in a club or community project, attending a public meeting on a community issue, or working with people on a community problem. Only 20 percent of people under age thirty with no college experience had done any of these things in the last year, compared with 40 percent of those with at least some college.17 So, while the new youth movement is certainly exciting, particularly after decades of disconnection, that excitement is tempered by the cold reality of a continued class divide between who gets involved and who does not. And even for those with at least some college, the levels don’t seem high enough to warrant great excitement.

  The gap in civic involvement between those with and without college experience reflects different opportunities to learn about politics and citizenship before college. The lack of involvement among those with less education is not the result of character flaws, laziness, or selfishness. Rather, the groundwork that must be laid early in life is too often missing for this group, a groundwork that begins at home but also includes the schools and organizations to which these young people are exposed. The Network and other researchers have found that college-bound youth, for example, more often come from home environments that emphasized the importance of citizenship and participation in community organizations. They more often attended high schools where they studied the Constitution, took part in civic role-playing or mock trials, experienced community service, and had a wide menu of options for extracurricular activities.18

  Once in college, the opportunities for engagement continue. College environments are natural hubs of social interest and action, and the concentration of young people who live on campuses makes it easier to recruit and mobilize students for political and civic activities. Candidates can hold rallies on college campuses, and young adults can find ready-made outlets to get involved in politics if they so desire. The college years are also intended to expand one’s mind. This makes college a prime setting in which young people can explore or wrestle with diverse perspectives and issues. College students are figuring out who they are in relation to the broader world. They are beginning to choose the roles that will guide and shape them for the remainder of their lives. They are solidifying notions of personal commitments, a sense of their own capacity and skills, and a sense of connection to others. All of these things contribute to the stark divide created by college.

  For Mai, a labor organizer from San Diego, college opened her eyes to the world around her. She also first began to develop a sense of identity as both a Vietnamese woman and an advocate for social welfare. The ethnic studies program at UCLA, she says, was integral to helping her figure out who she was and her place in this world. “That’s where my ideas began to develop into a more political consciousness,” she says. “I had a lot of different and really enriching experiences.” Mai wrote for an Asian American magazine on campus, she joined various issue-related organizations, and she served in student government, “where we were trying to get an ethnic studies requirement as part of the General Education curriculum.” She met many people who would serve as mentors, encouraging her to pursue her developing interests. “I was just very exposed to a lot of different ways of thinking,” she says, looking back on her experience. “It was a wonderful time. I felt like I really grew. It was where I decided that in the future I wanted to do social justice work.” She has made good on that promise. Today, she continues to work in the nonprofit sector as a labor organizer. She is also active in other arenas—voting, writing her representatives, protesting, and pitching in for her larger Asian American community whenever she can.

  In terms of civic engagement, what matters most about the college experience is not so much what it “teaches” young people as what it connects them to in the future—the workplaces, schools, and community organizations they end up in. Individuals with college experience are more likely to end up in settings that foster civic discussion and in which they gain civic knowledge. They are also more likely to be actively invited to join organizations or attend community meetings. They feel pressure to participate because others around them are also participating. For all of these reasons, college experience becomes the major player in determining how involved people are in early adulthood and beyond.


  When students who are not college-bound graduate from high school, they are presented with few opportunities to get involved thereafter. This is partly because there are now few outlets for them. Those without college experience are much less likely to be connected to a wide range of institutions that are the typical sites of recruitment for these types of groups—including voluntary associations, political parties, and especially unions.

  For this section of the population, the withering away of unions has taken a tremendous toll on opportunities for engagement and leadership. According to Constance Flanagan, who has extensively studied the organizing potential of unions, the process of representative democracy is embedded in unions. Union leaders run for their positions, they campaign, give speeches, learn about compromise, and listen to constituents. Union members in turn elect their representatives and learn to voice their concerns in a democratic process. Unions also offer formal training in the democratic process. “It’s a way of political incorporation,” says Flanagan. “Unions make you feel you’re included and have a voice. Except for the very wealthy, the rest of us don’t have clout unless we join together with someone. For the rank and file, the sense of solidarity matters and makes a difference.” The power and presence of unions evaporated with the demise of the manufacturing sector and the rise of the service sector, leaving the young people in these sectors with fewer opportunities to become acculturated into the political process and to feel that their voices have been heard.

  That downward trend could be countered by online communities, with their wide reach and low barriers to participation. The online world carries the potential to level the advantages that some have over others, whether it be an outgoing personality or an impressive résumé, thereby reducing certain forms of social inequality. Online is the public square writ large.

  All Can Enter Its Portals

  Digital media’s ability to reach new audiences in new ways holds hope for bridging the divide between young people who vote and volunteer and those who do not. Joseph Kahne recently completed a survey of video gaming and civic participation as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative, in conjunction with Pew Internet and American Life Project. He finds several indications that digital media can help bridge the gap between the more elite young adults and the working-class and less fortunate young people. His work on video games, for example, finds intriguing evidence that games with civic content—including games that raise ethical questions, those that offer leadership roles, and those that offer gamers the opportunity to help novices—can encourage youths to get involved offline in civic efforts. Young people who played games with civic content were more likely than those who played games without such content to discuss issues and follow elections (the teens in Kahne’s study were too young to vote), to volunteer or raise money for charity, and to work on community issues. These games are not the “chocolate-covered broccoli” learning games of the past—the good-for-you games that espouse poorly concealed civic lessons. These are games like Gamestar Mechanic or participating in the virtual world Second Life, which allow people to form and run their own societies, or to tackle issues such as pollution and poverty by organizing and cajoling thousands of other real-life players to cooperate for a greater good. Given that of eleven hundred teens surveyed, only thirty-nine had never played a video game, these games seem like key tools for engaging a wide variety of young people from all walks of life.

  Kahne also finds that participating in other forms of digital media, including social networks, blogs, and Second Life, among others, exposes young people to both those who agree and those who disagree with them. The more they are exposed to this wide range of opinions, the more likely they are to become civically engaged. Other studies have found that heavy users of digital media are more aware of a wide variety of information, including ideas and positions that run contrary to their own beliefs, than are lighter users or nonusers.19 This flies in the face of public concerns that regular or heavy Internet use is too focused on entertainment and consumption, or that it perpetuates special-interest groups and superficial relationships.

  “Digital media,” says Kahne, “might provide a way to reach the non-college-bound youth, given there is emerging evidence that kids who don’t go to college do use digital media to a significant degree. For kids who have a less smooth transition to adulthood, digital media might introduce them to networks that could pull them in. We find that youth who do not go to college were having discussions on websites almost as often as the college group. That tells us it’s possible to reach these kids.”

  Adulthood Delayed, Politics Delayed

  The Millennials’ excitement over the last presidential election, coupled with the digital world’s ability to capture the interests of an ever broader group of young adults, gives us a measure of hope that they might return to the fold of civic life. We also find hope in another fact: as people get older, they tend to become more involved. The lengthening transition to adulthood itself, therefore, might be one reason that young people have delayed their plunge into civic life. If that is the case, ample opportunities exist to create new hooks to draw them into civic life during this extended path to adulthood. We outline a few of these opportunities in the book’s final chapter.

  Back in Detroit, Sherri readily admits she should vote and get involved, but like many in her generation, she lacks one of the key incentives that drives people to the polls: self-interest. As the passage to adulthood becomes longer, the traditional opportunities for getting involved in civic life—the PTA, union jobs, new homes and the communities that go with them—are also delayed. These adult milestones motivate people to put a stake in the ground, and that stake is often voiced at the ballot box.

  Sherri and her husband have not yet felt those pulls. They have chosen to live temporarily in a mobile home park while they save money for an eventual house, and, without a traditional neighborhood, they do not feel a crystallized sense of community. They are both working in the service sector where the unions that encouraged Sherri’s father, who spent his entire career on the floor of a General Motors plant, to vote are now ghosts of their once strong selves.

  Sherri and Greg do not yet have children, which would immerse them in the school system, an entity that is, in itself, very political. Not only is the choice of school frequently determined by one’s political district, but the schools themselves are typically funded by local taxes. There is nothing quite like paying taxes to get people to the polls. “The laws seem like they affect more people with families and children than just single adults,” Sherri says, speaking for many in her generation who have not yet achieved the traditional milestones of adulthood. “I think maybe if I had kids maybe I would pay more attention to things.”

  Sherri is also feeling secure, both at work and at home. Her job is steady, she is happily married, she sees a decent future for her and her husband, and the indignities of crime or poverty or other social ills have not touched her and her family in any significant way. For her and Greg, there is no reason to rock the boat. They see no benefit to voting.

  The stretched-out transition to adulthood pushes the once-standard portals into voting and civic involvement back by as much as a decade. Time, experience, growing interests, and a shift from looking inward to looking outward to society all change with age and maturity. This change in perspective is reinforced in the hundreds of interviews the Network conducted. We had much more meaningful discussions about community involvement with those in their late twenties and early thirties. These discussions had a reflective quality about the civic world that is not as apparent in interviews with those in their late teens and early twenties. As Anne, a twenty-nine-year-old married mother, explains it, “the twenties are a pretty self-involved time … not necessarily in a bad way, but when you’re just kind of figuring out your own life. Maybe it’s just that you’re more inward-focused than outward-focused, and you’re not quite as aware of the world around you and your role in it.” As peo
ple get older, they figure that out—especially, she says, “once you have a family and you realize, ‘Okay, I need to help shape the world for them.’ ”

  This delay in civic involvement is also evident in voting data. The Network tracked voting rates among first-time voters dating back to the 1960s and found that with age, voting becomes more common. The generation that came of age in 1960 voted at a high rate from the start and had only modest rises in voting over time. They began voting at a rate of 67 percent; over the course of eight presidential elections, their turnout increased to 78 percent. Each successive generation since has had increasingly lower starting points, but each generation has also become substantially more engaged during their twenties and thirties. Although slower to the starting line, perhaps because the traditional markers of adulthood and adult responsibilities have been pushed back, young people eventually increase their voting. Sinking voter turnout is certainly a cause for concern, but all may not be lost—as young people slowly but surely begin to assume the mantle of adulthood, more will begin to cast their vote.