From the “Great Connector” to the “Great Sorter”
From the “Great Connector” to the “Great Sorter”
Young Americans need more communal pathways to adulthood than the traditional, four-year college route
Earlier this week, I published a new essay on the adult transition for American Compass. I’ve re-posted it below and you can read the full piece here. I’ll also be hosting an event on the adult transition with the American Exchange Project and Maryland’s Department of Service & Civic Innovation, which you can register for here.
In today’s America, we’re sorting ourselves to death.
The college degree has become the dividing line in American life, shaping not only our economic lives but our social lives, too. And it’s about more than just the credential. The intensely social, cohort-based experience of attending a four-year college is the driver of the sorting during the transition into adulthood. Americans who don’t attend four-year college (or join the military) have few structured, alternative pathways. Often, they simply lose out on this collective experience of the adult transition altogether.
It wasn’t always this way. America’s state-mediated version of the adult transition started with promise as a shared experience of military service during World War II. But this transitional period has become an exclusive experience mostly reserved for children of college-educated parents. What began as the great connector of Americans across class lines has become the great sorter of our social lives along class lines. Increasingly, college grads have cultivated robust networks of fellow college grads, while those without four-year degrees have been left on their own. Increasingly, college grads live long lives surrounded by family and friends, while Americans without degrees die young and alone.
This sorting of our social lives is a national shame. It should grieve us all. And it should call us to collectively create a more just reality where all Americans can flourish, regardless of whether they went to college. Such change will demand civic, cultural, and policy action. And this can begin with reimagining the adult transition to again become the great connector of all Americans.
Sorting Ourselves to Death
The nationalized model of the adult transition originated during World War II as a remarkably collectivist endeavor. First, the mass mobilization of troops created a shared, transitional experience for an entire generation of young men. Then, the passing of the G.I. Bill of Rights opened up four-year colleges to millions of returning veterans. In The Years That Matter Most, Paul Tough describes the sea change that the G.I. Bill ushered in: “In the public imagination, college came to be seen, for the first time, not as an exclusive privilege of the moneyed elite but as the most promising path for ordinary Americans to reach new opportunities in life.”
But this collective, cross-class experience of the adult transition didn’t last long. With the creation of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973, the military shifted from an institution that the vast majority of men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s joined, to one in which less than 1% of the population now actively serves. During this same time period, four-year colleges shifted to becoming a “meritocracy”—originally a term from science fiction to describe a dystopian future where merit (IQ and effort) serves as the central organizing principle of society—designing a higher education system to reward America’s “best and brightest” on the basis of this very same measurable form of merit.
Almost immediately, college-educated parents started gaming the college admissions process to the benefit of their children. They enrolled their kids in top public and private schools. They signed them up for expensive extracurriculars that admissions officers prize. And they paid for tutors and test prep classes to ensure their scores hit the marks. Predictably, massive class gaps began to emerge in rates of college access and completion, with 77% of students from the top quartile of family earnings graduating from college, compared to just 9% of students in the bottom quartile. This is particularly the case at selective residential colleges, where about 50% of students at the 480 most selective schools come from the top quintile of family earners.
Four-year colleges, previously a private institution of the hereditary aristocracy, are now a private institution of the “hereditary meritocracy.”
Meanwhile, today’s emerging adults who do not attend four-year colleges and do not join the military often completely miss out on a collective experience of the adult transition. They may attend community, commuter, or for-profit colleges that are predominantly for part-time students and lack a cohort experience. They may get full- or part-time jobs immediately after high school, encountering a labor market of unpredictable and unstable work that makes relationship formation more difficult. Or they may not enter the labor force altogether and end up completely detached: Indeed, in several regions of the country, not-working rates for prime-age males (age 25-54) range from 20 to 30%.
As a partial result of these shifts, a great chasm has opened during the adult transition. Those who attend four-year colleges—often the children of higher-income, college-educated parents—supercharge their social lives. They cultivate habits of participation, expand their friendship and mentorship networks, and even meet fellow well-off life partners through assortative mating. In contrast, for those who don’t enroll in four-year colleges or join the military, the adult transition can be defined by fragmentation and disconnection. Thrust into adulthood without a structured rite of passage, they often miss out on the shared cohort experiences that help build long-term relationships.
The downstream consequences of this shift can be dire. Not only are all Americans forming fewer cross-class friendships, Americans without degrees are becoming less likely to have any friends at all. In recent research Daniel Cox and I published with the Survey Center on American Life, we find that nearly one in four Americans without degrees have no close friends, compared with just 10% of college-educated Americans. This translates to significantly lower levels of social support for Americans without degrees: they have fewer people to listen to them when they have a problem, fewer people to watch their children, fewer people to offer them a place to stay in a time of need, and fewer people to care for them if they get sick. This is not an individualized form of loneliness; it’s a structural aloneness rooted in the adult transition, with the college degree as the dividing line.
A Window of Opportunity
It need not be this way: The adult transition can again become the great connector of Americans instead of the great sorter. Policy change contributed to college becoming the “great sorting machine” and policy change (along with concomitant shifts in our culture) can reverse these trends. With intention, the adult transition can again become a major leverage point for strengthening the connectedness of all Americans.
The moment is ripe for this type of change. Confidence in higher education as an institution has fallen off a cliff in the past decade. People are asking fundamental questions about what a degree is for in the age of AI. And nearly 60% of today’s 18- to 25-year-olds report that their lives lack “meaning and purpose.” Americans want something different—both young people and their parents—and there’s an opening to reimagine what the adult transition could look like.
Fortunately, some states are beginning to seize on this opportunity.
State leaders in California and Maryland have created service year options to incentivize one year of public service for all high school graduates. While the workforce development elements of these initiatives (e.g., job training, benefits for college and vocational programs) provide their economic grounding, it is the cohort experience that holds the most promise for reshaping the adult transition. In Maryland, all corps members participate in quarterly trainings facilitated by Thread, where they have the opportunity to practice skills for connecting across difference. The program is also structured with monthly cohort-based programming, bringing together young Marylanders of diverse backgrounds—geographic, socioeconomic, race, and more—to build relationships around a shared mission. Though still in their infancy, these programs aim to reach a plurality of their state’s high school graduates at scale and hold the potential to create a meaningful cross-class and cross-geography experience of the adult transition.
States are also considering funding the emergent model of domestic exchange programs. Such initiatives—pioneered by groups like the American Exchange Project (AEP)—provide high school juniors and seniors a cohort-based opportunity to experience living in geographically, demographically, and ideologically different communities than their own. States would fund them through a state-level service commission or education agency, offer them in partnership with multiple states for reciprocity purposes, and operate them in partnership with nonprofits like AEP and local high schools. While no panacea, these exchange programs, if realized at scale, have the potential to forge lasting relationships for hundreds of thousands of young people hailing from very different backgrounds.
Recently, policymakers and funders have also made considerable investments in apprenticeship, work-based learning, and vocational training programs that promote non-college career pathways. These programs should not only be treated as workforce development efforts, but also opportunities for social development. State and regional workforce organizations and private employers should intentionally incorporate peer-based experiences into these programs to help build relationships. Trainees should have the opportunity to connect with fellow trainees on a consistent basis, both through cohort-based learning and ongoing social programming. By making non-college pathways more structured and collective experiences, state and regional workforce programs can bolster the long-term connectedness of Americans who don’t go to college.
These initiatives alone are not enough to fully address the sorting that is currently occurring during the adult transition. But the scale of the educational divide in this country means that no one policy or program will be enough. This calls for an “all of the above” approach — more policies like service years and domestic exchanges, more accessible “gap year” programs, and more of a cultural emphasis on the importance of formation and connection during the adult transition.
The adult transition will always shape the lives of emerging adults in America. Through intentional policies and elite “dream hoarding,” we’ve allowed this formative period to sort our lives by class. This was a choice. But we can also make another choice: to rebuild the adult transition to promote the connection and flourishing of all our neighbors, not just the ones we went to school with.