Network members Connie Flanagan and Wayne Osgood are analyzing data from Monitoring the Future, a large annual survey of high school students that tracks their opinions and attitudes on a range of topics. Laura Wray, a graduate student working with Flanagan and Osgood, published this op-ed in the Washington Post based on findings from their research.
An Inconvenient Truth about Youth
Laura Wray
Washington Post, op-ed, September 11, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/10/AR2006091001133.html
An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s recent movie on global warming, is now the fourth largest grossing documentary of all time. Yet, apparently it isn’t young adults who are paying the price of the ticket—or more important, taking the truth about the environment to heart. In fact, the inconvenient truth today is that youths’ willingness to conserve gas, heat, and energy has taken a precipitous plunge since the 1980s.
According to data from Monitoring the Future, a federally funded national survey on trends in the attitudes, values, and behaviors of high school seniors since 1976, there has been a clear decline in conservation behaviors among 18-year-olds over the past 27 years— although we are not yet sure whether these attitudes follow youth into adulthood. This decline, interestingly, is coupled with a rise in materialistic values.
In fact, trends in materialism and conservation are highly related: at times when youth place higher value on material goods, they are also much less likely to say they would conserve resources. And when youth place higher value on material goods, they are also much less likely to admit that resources will be scarce in the future.
Since the 1990s, the trends in materialism seem to have topped out at a steady, high level, while willingness to conserve continues to decline. These opposing values should raise a red flag about the consumer culture and its broad influence on youth.
Youth also consistently believe that government is more responsible for the environment than they are personally. Importantly, when they perceive that the government’s role in solving environmental problems is declining, so does their belief that they, personally, must do their part to save the environment.
Conservation is a collective responsibility. Likewise, in the minds of youth, their own actions to preserve the environment are inextricably linked to their perception of the government’s role in environmental conservation.
Indeed, environmental attitudes of youth seem to mirror the opinions of those in the White House at the time. The highest levels of conservation occurred in the mid- to late 1970s, at the same time that President Carter was publicly petitioning citizens to take individual responsibility in conserving resources. The steepest decline in conservation occurred during the Reagan administration, which has been widely criticized for its anti-environmental policies. Willingness to conserve enjoyed a slight surge around 1992-1993, when Clinton first took office, but this increase was short-lived (Al Gore must not have been speaking up too loudly about the environment back then).
The good news in these trends is that when government responds, so too do youth. If our country’s leaders follow the example of Al Gore and start to genuinely explore sustainable solutions, it is likely that young people will follow suit.
Political planners might also want to take note of the fact that when youth embrace conservation and pro-environmental attitudes, they are also more likely to engage in conventional politics, from writing to officials, to giving money to a political campaign, or working on a campaign.
Gore argues that in America, “political will is a renewable resource.” Perhaps one way to renew this resource is to start focusing more on young people and their understanding of, as well as contribution to, environmental problems.
Laura Wray is graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, working with members of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, Constance Flanagan and D. Wayne Osgood, in mapping the changing attitudes of young adults.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Failure to Launch or Launching Too Soon?
by Maria Kefalas
So what are your plans after graduation? As June approaches, this dreaded question not only weighs on the minds of the nation's college grads, but in the age of "Failure to Launch," it likely keeps more than a few parents awake at night.
Magazines and newspapers are full of stories about twenty-somethings who can't seem to fly the coop. Self-help books with titles such as Twenty-something, Twenty-everything, and The Quarter-Life Crisis promise guidance to young people overwhelmed at the thought of entering the "real world."
Yet, all the advice and fretting misses a crucial point. The self-focus, exploration, and perceived possibility of this time of life is a luxury reserved for only the most privileged elite—for only about 1 in 4 25-year-olds, or just about 27 percent of this age group, earn that all-important college credential which makes the freewheeling twenty-something years possible.
In contrast to the media portrayals and conventional wisdom which suggest that today's iPod generation can't leave the leave the nest, consider the findings of Penn State researcher Wayne Osgood and his colleagues. They show that many young people continue to follow the traditional route to adulthood that defined the marriage rush and baby boom decade of the 1950s.
"Fast-starters," as Osgood calls them, are the young people with modest educations and modest resources who move into full-time jobs, marriage, and their own place far sooner than their upper-class peers.
However, they do so at a price. Young people progressing at lightning speed into adulthood accomplish this by neglecting schooling. This means fast-starters acquire the markers of adulthood on the fast track, but that they risk getting get trapped between the rock and a hard place of a blue- and pink-collar labor sector where down-sizing, stagnating wages, shrinking worker's benefits, and nonexistent job mobility eat away at their chances of getting ahead. Even marriage is not as stable for this group. Fast-starters might walk down the aisle earlier in life, but their unions are more likely to end in divorce than their college educated peers.
As uncertain as things might be for the fast starters, another group faces an even more questionable future. These disconnected young adults—some estimates put this population at 14 percent of 18-24 year olds—are often neither working, nor going to school, nor active in the military. Many have aged out of foster care, bounced around in homeless shelters and spent time in juvenile detention facilities. These are our most vulnerable youth, and without support and intervention, the only road they'll take is probably the one leading to jail, or worse.
In The Culture of Fear, sociologist Barry Glassner wryly observes that Americans are afraid of the wrong things. And so it seems, this might be the case with the latest take on "the problem with young people today." At first glance, the highly educated, so-called millennials" might seem slow to get started, but be assured, this select minority is on target to do almost everything their parents hope and expect for them.
The true "lost generation" is the factory worker who regrets not learning more about computers, the waitress and single mom who even with a full-time job earns too little to permanently leave public assistance, or the married 23-year-old mother working the night-shift at a convenience store, too exhausted to keep up with course work for her teaching degree.
And finally, most distressingly of all, are the steadily swelling ranks of the largely male drop-outs—from high schools, community, and four-year colleges—who lack the capital (human, social, cultural and economic) to lead productive lives.
Perhaps the most important lesson for this commencement season is that we are living in an America that is profoundly unequal, and that the simultaneously harsh and mundane realities of the twenty-first century's global economy mean that a college degree determine who will become a have or have-not. Community colleges show promise as an alternative for young people not destined for a university campus, but they remain an under-used resource in creating trained workers.
We must do far more to reach out to the large numbers of youth trying to navigate this new terrain of early adulthood without the scaffolding affluent families can provide. At the end of the day, the legions of college grads moving back home while they figure out what to do after college is not something to lose sleep over. The growing numbers of young people embarking on adulthood without the education and skills they need to lead engaged and purposeful lives: that should be keeping somebody up at night.
Maria Kefalas is an associate member of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and director of the Institute for Violence Research and Prevention, Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia. She is the co-author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage.
So what are your plans after graduation? As June approaches, this dreaded question not only weighs on the minds of the nation's college grads, but in the age of "Failure to Launch," it likely keeps more than a few parents awake at night.
Magazines and newspapers are full of stories about twenty-somethings who can't seem to fly the coop. Self-help books with titles such as Twenty-something, Twenty-everything, and The Quarter-Life Crisis promise guidance to young people overwhelmed at the thought of entering the "real world."
Yet, all the advice and fretting misses a crucial point. The self-focus, exploration, and perceived possibility of this time of life is a luxury reserved for only the most privileged elite—for only about 1 in 4 25-year-olds, or just about 27 percent of this age group, earn that all-important college credential which makes the freewheeling twenty-something years possible.
In contrast to the media portrayals and conventional wisdom which suggest that today's iPod generation can't leave the leave the nest, consider the findings of Penn State researcher Wayne Osgood and his colleagues. They show that many young people continue to follow the traditional route to adulthood that defined the marriage rush and baby boom decade of the 1950s.
"Fast-starters," as Osgood calls them, are the young people with modest educations and modest resources who move into full-time jobs, marriage, and their own place far sooner than their upper-class peers.
However, they do so at a price. Young people progressing at lightning speed into adulthood accomplish this by neglecting schooling. This means fast-starters acquire the markers of adulthood on the fast track, but that they risk getting get trapped between the rock and a hard place of a blue- and pink-collar labor sector where down-sizing, stagnating wages, shrinking worker's benefits, and nonexistent job mobility eat away at their chances of getting ahead. Even marriage is not as stable for this group. Fast-starters might walk down the aisle earlier in life, but their unions are more likely to end in divorce than their college educated peers.
As uncertain as things might be for the fast starters, another group faces an even more questionable future. These disconnected young adults—some estimates put this population at 14 percent of 18-24 year olds—are often neither working, nor going to school, nor active in the military. Many have aged out of foster care, bounced around in homeless shelters and spent time in juvenile detention facilities. These are our most vulnerable youth, and without support and intervention, the only road they'll take is probably the one leading to jail, or worse.
In The Culture of Fear, sociologist Barry Glassner wryly observes that Americans are afraid of the wrong things. And so it seems, this might be the case with the latest take on "the problem with young people today." At first glance, the highly educated, so-called millennials" might seem slow to get started, but be assured, this select minority is on target to do almost everything their parents hope and expect for them.
The true "lost generation" is the factory worker who regrets not learning more about computers, the waitress and single mom who even with a full-time job earns too little to permanently leave public assistance, or the married 23-year-old mother working the night-shift at a convenience store, too exhausted to keep up with course work for her teaching degree.
And finally, most distressingly of all, are the steadily swelling ranks of the largely male drop-outs—from high schools, community, and four-year colleges—who lack the capital (human, social, cultural and economic) to lead productive lives.
Perhaps the most important lesson for this commencement season is that we are living in an America that is profoundly unequal, and that the simultaneously harsh and mundane realities of the twenty-first century's global economy mean that a college degree determine who will become a have or have-not. Community colleges show promise as an alternative for young people not destined for a university campus, but they remain an under-used resource in creating trained workers.
We must do far more to reach out to the large numbers of youth trying to navigate this new terrain of early adulthood without the scaffolding affluent families can provide. At the end of the day, the legions of college grads moving back home while they figure out what to do after college is not something to lose sleep over. The growing numbers of young people embarking on adulthood without the education and skills they need to lead engaged and purposeful lives: that should be keeping somebody up at night.
Maria Kefalas is an associate member of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and director of the Institute for Violence Research and Prevention, Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia. She is the co-author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage.
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