Helping Students Transition into Adulthood
- Jun 6, 2010
Before the late 1800’s people did not commonly recognize “adolescence” as a unique period of life. In some cultures, men and women as young as thirteen or fourteen in were considered adults and in no way qualitatively different from their elders. German Psychologist G. Stanly Hall (1844-1924) was the first to describe adolescence as a stage of life and the first to recognize young persons in this stage as having unique feelings and needs. He famously wrote that this time was full of “turm und drang,” or “storm and stress.”
Since that time, many have followed in Hall’s footsteps and further researched and described the emerging social phenomenon of adolescence. Some argued that it was not as stressful as Hall had claimed and some thought that adolescence was simply a social construct created by Western culture. Regardless, the term adolescence has endured and is now a commonly accepted part of human growth and development. Fast forward 100 years and another psychologist is about to redefine our understanding of the transition from childhood to adulthood once again. In the year 2000, Jeffery Jenson Arnett gave us the term emerging adult.
It is said that adolescence begins biologically and ends vocationally; meaning that it is very easy to identify the onset of adolescence, but it is difficult to determine when an individual completes the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Legally, adulthood begins at the age of 18, but most 18 year olds do not consider themselves to be adults, and neither do their parents (Nelson, Carol, Walker, Madsen & Carolyn, 2007).
Graduating, moving away from parents, getting married, or starting a job all used to be threshold experiences associated with adulthood. Now, these experiences have less significance because young men and women are more likely to go back to school, delay marriage (or get divorced), or move back in with their parents (Molgat, 2007). This back and forth action has the potential to place young men and women in an awkward state of “semi-autonomy” that leaves them partially independent and partially relying on their parents (Goldschieder & Davenzo, 1999).
So what is the twenty-five year old graduate student who lives with his parents? Is he an adolescent or an adult? Odds are not even he knows (Blinn-Pike, Lokken, Jonkman, & Smith, 2008). That is why we now have the term “emerging adult” to describe the young men and women ages 18-27 (Arnett, 2000). Like adolescence, emerging adulthood has only recently been identified because it a societal construct that has arisen due to changes in our culture. Emerging adulthood as a stage of development is mainly recognized in Western, post-industrial countries such as
Seniors in college are especially prone to the stressors of emerging adulthood because they are about to make the transition from education to employment and, thus, adulthood. Across the country people are beginning to understand that seniors are struggling with the transition from graduation to life after college and many institutions are developing programs to help seniors take the next step. John Gardner’s book The Senior Year Experience (1998) outlines the process of developing and implementing senior based programming; but that is only a start. In the same way that freshmen are oriented to our cultures when they arrive at college, we need to recognize seniors as people in transition (Chickering & Schlossberg 1998) and help to re-orient them to another culture when they leave.
In my thesis research I conducted a series of qualitative interviews with recent graduates to learn more about the feelings and needs of emerging adults after graduation. The following represents the findings from this research. For the purposes of this article I’ve broken these findings down into three sections: adulthood defined, feelings and challenges facing recent graduates, and implications for higher education.
Adulthood Defined
As predicted, participants found it difficult to define exactly what makes a person became an adult or when this transition happens. Most of the people I interviewed did not even mention age as a criterion for adulthood. Instead, participants generally described a combination of personal factors and life circumstances. Overwhelmingly, they talked about responsibility and independence as being major factors in becoming an adult along with personal characteristics like maturity and wisdom
In this study, participants defined “responsibility” in a lot of different ways. In some cases it meant having a full time job and in others it meant taking care of a family. In general, responsibility was defined as taking upon one’s self the requirements of financial and residential independence from one’s parents. Older, married participants spent more time describing responsibilities to church and community as being a critical part of adulthood, but those who had recently graduated focused primarily on vocation and location.
However, having a few responsibilities does not make a person an adult unless that person also has the maturity to take them seriously. According to these recent graduates, punching a time-card and paying rent does not make just anyone an adult; adults act and live responsibly, too. There are a lot of 20-25 year olds who can hold a job but really haven’t “grown up.” My findings confirmed previous assertions (Arnett, 1998) that nothing makes a person “grow up” faster than getting married and having a child. Students in college do not share futures with their peers, nor do they share bank accounts, in-laws, or children. Marriage turns adolescents into adults faster than anything we can do as educators, but as the average marrying age continues to climb (28 for men and 26 for women according to data from the 2010 census) what can be done for college students and the majority of unmarried emerging adults? How can students be taught responsibility for themselves and others when their parents pay the bills, professionals clean their residence halls and prepare their food, and the only education they need to worry about is their own?
Common Feelings and Challenges Facing Emerging Adults
An optimist would say that graduating from college single and without a defined career trajectory provides limitless opportunity. However, the other side of opportunity is uncertainty, which is the most difficult challenge the majority of recent graduates face. Participants in my study who were not married or in graduate school expressed having high levels of anxiety and uncertainty following graduation and most participants expressed the same feelings described by Graham and McKenzie (1995): namely, disappointment at work when the long awaited first job did not turn out to be as glamorous as hoped. College and work are very different environments that require different learning styles, different forms of feedback, and certainly a different schedule (Candy & Crebert, 1991). Somebody forgot to tell this to our undergraduates.
The graduates I interviewed lamented that finding a job was the easy part (though that, too, was harder than they expected); finding a job they liked was the hard part. Students who graduate from expensive, private schools do not expect to spend time unemployed or answer phones and take messages for a living. And, while this is most likely not a student’s entire future, it is probably the immediate future for a lot of seniors.
The other difficulty that comes along with working all day is the strain it puts on one’s social life. It is not that emerging adults are spoiled and need more time to “party” with their peers—it’s that emerging adults can’t find any peers with which to party. The majority of graduates I interviewed talked about how hard it was to make friends at work. Most of their co-workers had families to go home to after work and were in a completely different stage of life than young professionals fresh out of college. One woman I interviewed specifically mentioned how hard it is to find single “twentysomethings” if one is not into the bar scene or relying on alcohol to have a good time.
The age difference was an especially difficult challenge at first and a problem that some participants still have not solved. Up until the point of college graduation, almost every aspect of a college student’s life has been organized and directed so that he or she would be around peers of his/her own age. School, sports teams, clubs, Sunday school/youth group, and the clearly defined pecking order of high school’s social strata are organized by age. After graduation, emerging adults find that for the first time ever they are no longer surrounded by their cohort and they need to learn how to make friends – even friends from different age groups - all over again.
Implications
In one sense, this is not a student affairs problem. None of this affects students’ ability to succeed in college. However, I don’t know one student affairs professional who is not interested in helping students to succeed after they graduate. This is especially true if the mission of one’s university is geared towards preparing students to be leaders, ministers, life long learners, and responsibly engaged citizens. It should be our hope that graduates are ready to face the challenges of adulthood and can “hit the ground running” after graduation and not take several years to reacclimatize themselves to a world that is nothing like they expected.
Emotional Adjustment
Many schools have senior seminars or capstone courses that help students make sense of everything they’ve learned in the classroom and how it can be integrated with their faith and their life after college. Programs and courses like these are a wonderful start, but somewhere we must make room to discuss the emotional, psychological, social, and possible spiritual difficulties that are likely in store for students after they leave our communities. With great care we take in high school students and prepare them as best as we can for the challenges and difficulties of college. In freshmen orientation courses we hand them the secrets to success and warn them of potential pitfalls. We need to do the same with seniors as they face yet another transition. Somewhere in the curriculum (or the co-curriculum) we need senior “re-orientation” in which students are able to interact with recent alumni, the issues facing new graduates and literature on emerging adulthood and the Quarterlife crisis. Students may be aware that life after college can be difficult, but hard data and tangible examples should create a sense of urgency that will prompt students to engage in a thoughtful dialogue about their future beyond just the jobs they wish to have.
Career Development
There is plenty of current literature aimed at helping employers deal with the unique demands of managing millennial employees, but are we intentionally preparing our students for the unique challenges of working for Baby Boomers? Students should learn about the downward mobility of taking a new job, the disappointment that normally accompanies the beginning of employment, the difficulty of finding peers at work, the differences between employment and college, and generational differences between themselves and potential employers.
Adult Identity
Chickering and Reisser (1993) emphasized that identity development was an important part of the college experience. An understanding of emerging adulthood now tells us that this means identity development as an adult. There are advantages to helping students cross the threshold of adulthood. Research shows that among college students, those who consider themselves to have arrived at adulthood have a better sense of their overall identity, have a better idea of what they are looking for in a romantic partner, and have lower levels of depression (Nelson & Barry, 2005), and individuals who consider themselves to be adults are less likely to be involved in risk taking behavior like problem drinking (Blinn-Pike et al., 2008).
We can help students achieve adult identity by fostering in them the qualities of maturity, wisdom, and responsibility. Of course, this is not a new idea; we have been trying to foster these values in students for their intrinsic value, but in the context of adult identity we now have a framework and a goal that guides us. We realize no amount of support or guidance can completely remove the growing pains of becoming an adult, but hopefully intentional educators can help reduce the “turm und drang” to a manageable level and prepare students for success after graduation.
Steve Conn is a recent graduate of the Masters of Arts in Higher Education program at Taylor University. He has worked the past two years at Huntington University, located in Huntington, Indiana.
References
Arnett, J. (1998). Learning to stand alone: The contemporary American transition to adulthood in cultural and historical context. Human Development, 41(1), 295-315.
Arnett, J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, 55(5), 469-480.
Arnett, J., (2004) Emerging adulthood: The winding road from late teens through the twenties. New York , NY : Oxford University
Blinn-Pike, L., Lokken, S., Jonkman J., & Smith, G. (2008). Emerging adult versus adult status among college students: Examination of explanatory variables. Adolescence, 43(171), 577-591.
Chickering, A., & Reisser, L. (1993). The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series: Education and identity (2nd ed.).
Chickering, A., & Schlossberg, N. (1998). Moving on: Seniors as people in transition. In Gardner & Van der Veer (eds.), The senior year experience (pp. 37-50).
Gardner & Van der Veer (eds.) (2008). The senior year experience.
Goldschieder, F., & Davanzo, J. (1999). Semi-autonomy and leaving home in early adulthood. Social Forces, 65(1), 187-201.
Graham, C., & McKenzie, A. (1995). Delivering the promise: The transition from higher education to work. Education and Training, 37(1), 4-11.
Nelson, L., & Barry, C. (2005). Distinguishing features of emerging adulthood: The role of self-classification as an adult. Journal of Adolescent Research, 20(3), 417-417.
Nelson, L., Carol, J., Walker, L., Madsen, S., Carolyn, B. (2007). “If you want me to treat you like an adult, start acting like one!” Comparing the criteria that emerging adults and their parents have for adulthood. Journal of Family Counseling, 21(4), 665-674.
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