Visual

    I chose this image because it depicts how the road to adulthood has been elongated. There have been delays in common life events that used to signify adulthood. Such events are buying a home, marriage, starting a family, etc. There has also been dependence of parents to assist in paying off college debt. With the cost of higher education on the rise, young adults are not able to fully pay off their debt on their own, so they look toward their family for assistance. This cartoon shows just that. Young adults borrow an average of $38,000 from their parents to pay off college debt and for living expenses. Part of these living expenses may include taking care of a child, but not family. Since marriage is so uncommon for young adults just getting out of college, 40% of mothers become unmarried mothers. Marriage becomes too expensive, which is why it is delayed until about the age of 26. All of these factors create a delay in the emergence of adulthood.

Literature Review 5

    David Elkind, professor in Tufts University, is well known for his groundbreaking works on the dangers of "pushing down" during early childhood education. He states that teachers and parents could disrupt the education of children and distort their development of learning. He is well connected with the decline of social markers. His book, All Grown Up and No Place to Go, is about the pressures that society places on teenagers encouraging them to grow up into early adulthood. This leads to self disruptive behavior that has set the pattern of rushing into adulthood for the current day generation.
    On the subject of teenagers being pushed into the adult culture, Elkind states, With so many sexually active adolescents, with so many young people experimenting with alcohol and other drugs, the perception of teenage immaturity had to be abandoned” (Elkind 6). During the sexual revolution, the idea of what was acceptable and what wasn't changed drastically. Teenagers began to experiment with drugs and alcohol because it became the adult thing to do. Aside from that, sexual experimentation also became acceptable and even encouraged by the media. Teenagers slowly began to be pushed into the adult life, leaving their innocence behind. They were introduced to sex-education courses in high school which made them more aware of their nature. "Thanks in large part to television, films, magazines, and music lyrics, even young children are witness to brutality, violence, an sexuality on a scale that would have been unimaginable five or six decades ago"(Elkind 8). He goes on to say that "By the time they are adolescents, therefore, most contemporary teenagers have already been exposed to more violent and seamier sides of life than their parents and grandparents had seen or heard of in a lifetime" (Elkind 8). This concept of exposure being the utmost amount of information compared to those older (parents and grandparents) is generally very interesting. I like the idea that the youth will continuously know more and probably try more than the older generations have. This idea kicked off the pattern of ongoing experimentation that we see today. The exposure of adult content was geared toward teenagers, specifically though "soaps" and "soft porn". This rushed teenagers into young adulthood that normally deserved more time for transitioning. He describes this concept of teenagers being pushed into young adulthood and ripped away of their innocence.
This material, although dealing with teenagers as opposed to college students, connects to my research because it described the root of this pattern of society's influence on labels of age groups. Society played a key role with the teenagers after the 1960's. It forced them into young adulthood, but then current day society had been delaying the transition into adulthood from this state of young adulthood. These young adults are stuck in somewhat of a limbo between the two stages of maturity.

Elkind, David. All Grown Up and No Place to Go. Massachusetts. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
        Print.

Literature Review 4

    Tamara Draut is the director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos, which is a public policy center in New York City. Her research primarily focuses on household debt in America. She has been covered by newspapers such as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as appearing on the Today Show, ABC World News Tonight, CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight and Fox News.  
    Her first book, Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30- Somethings can't get Ahead provides a look into the obstacles that young adults face after college graduation. She describes how a college degree is now the equivalence of a high school diploma and the reasons for it. Draut states that "piling up debt has become a new rite of passage into adulthood" (91). She goes into further detail of this concept by describing the jaw-dropping credit card debt accumulated in early adulthood. Quoting the Washington Post,  she says "The growth in credit card debt is about instant gratification and the inability to live within one's means" (Draut 92). Due to the popular and expensive charges such as car repair, travel, and the necessities for moving out, credit card debt has been the go-to "trust fund" for the past couple of generations. This material strengthens my research question because it explains the mentality of young adults. They pay with credit cards for items they are unable to pay off, not for a couple of months, and wind up collecting debt. This debt is what does't allow them to move ahead in life.
    As stated before, this attitude of piling up on debt through credit cards is one of the reasons why there is a delay in adulthood. She goes on to say, "Although debt-for-diploma is preferable to no diploma at all, heavy doses of student loans are causing more grads to report serious side effects" (Draut 98). These "side effects" include the delay of marriage (14% of students reported in 2002 compared to 7% in 1991), the delay of having children (20% as opposed to 12% is 1991), and buying a home (40% as opposed to 25% in 1991), all of which typically define the emergence into adulthood (Draut 98). Her concept is that this delay is due to student loan debt, which has dramatically risen in the 1990's.  This is due to Congress's establishment of a federal loan program that was open to all students, regardless of their household income. This was made to support the middle class, where families were unable to pay increasing college costs. In the long run, this led the middle class into serious debt. This information directly supports my research because it shows the percentage changes in graduates waiting until they move on with their lives to proceed to the typical "adult" steps. Buying a house, getting married and settling down is the epitome of emerging adulthood, or at least the traditional idea of adulthood. This describes the delays young adults and in and gives a direct reason why they are there.

Draut, Tamara. Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30- Somethings can't get Ahead. 
          New York: Anchor Books, 2005. Print.

Literature Review 3

 
     Authors Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum have written about the quality of college education in  "Academically Adrift". Together, they tackle the problems of current-day college students' struggles when dealing with the transition into adulthood. Change is a magazine that deals with contemporary issues with higher education. Its writing is geared toward students and faculty members who are both educated and willing to learn about societies' patterns and problems in higher education.
     This reading does a good job of depicting the troubles of college graduates and the reasons for them. It describes a study performed on college students who finished college "on time", which means within the four year time span, and searches to find what those students did with their lives two years after graduation. The shocking statistics show how graduating from college does not necessarily place a person in a guaranteed successful lifestyle. The study used the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) which measures the academic growth of a students through their skill levels in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. Students who performed in the top quintile of the CLA had more successful lives after two years of graduation. "Graduates who were highly academically engaged and demonstrated growth on the CLA task were slightly less likely to be unemployed than those who exhibited low levels of academic engagement/growth" (10). We are taught that the better we perform in school, the more successful we will be in our future. The CLA seems to support this statement. The bottom quintile had three times the chance of unemployment possibility when compared to the top quintile. College seniors of 2009 had an average of $24,000 in student-loan debt, which supports the thought brought up by the authors; "Debt has thus become a part of the American higher education land-scape" (10). Not surprisingly enough, 52% of students from highly educated families took out loans, compared to 75% from not highly educated families. The statistics show that "(students at the upper quintile of the CLA)..at the end of college faced much smoother transitions to adulthood" (14). This shows that rigorous college education should be enforced and raised at a higher standard to expect graduating college students to have successful lives. It will give them the right preparation for a successful future.
   This reading helps me explore my research question by providing me statistics that show how unprepared students are when they are released into the real world. The study on that group of students showed the importance of the CLA and the factor it plays in career development. It stated that about 2/3 of college graduates had borrowed money to pay for college, averaging a debt of $27,200. This debt, along with unsatisfactory education, is holding graduates back from entering adulthood.


Roksa, Josipa & Arum, Richard. "Life After College: The Challenging Transitions of the
          Academically Adrift Cohurt." Change. 2012: 8-14. Print.