The Decisive Decade

The 10 years from 18 to 28 are the decisive decade in a person’s life.

Decisions made during this period disproportionately shape a person’s future life trajectory. Mistakes made then carry lifelong consequences.

Teens get second chances, but our society is less forgiving of missteps made during the 20s.

It’s actually during the 20s, and not the teen years, that lives are most likely to go off track. It’s then that the young engage in the riskiest behavior—binge drinking, illicit drug use, unprotected sex and crime.

It’s also in the 20s that contemporary society’s inequalities solidify.

No wonder the 20s have become a time of intense anxiety and apprehension.

The 20s, then, are life’s critical years. Whether one earns a college credential makes a world of difference in one’s future earnings and job stability. Where one goes to college and what degree one earns also exert a powerful influence on whether one will receive a diploma and a well-paying postgraduation job.

The young people who are most successful follow a pre-professional path: either they earn a degree in a high-demand professional field, like accounting, computer science, engineering or nursing, or they enter a highly competitive graduate program or a professional program either immediately or soon after earning their bachelor’s degree.

The professional pathways are well-trod and almost certainly lead to a well-paying job.

Another path to success is reserved for those privileged young people who are fortunate to have affluent, well-connected parents. Their mid- to late 20s serve as a period of self-discovery, exploration and personal growth, as they build up their résumé.

But what about the vast majority of 20-somethings?

Some—especially those with degrees in psychology, business, social science and communications—will gravitate to managerial jobs. Even though their undergraduate training did little to prepare them for such slots, their degrees nonetheless open doors.

Other young people will flail and flounder for a number of years until they fall into a job that may or may not reflect their interests and training.

But all too many 20-somethings find themselves mired in unsteady, low-paying jobs and unstable relationships, and burdened by credit-card and college debts that their income cannot support. Still others are disconnected, neither in college nor the labor force.

So what can we do to make the transition to a stable and secure adulthood more seamless?

First, we must recognize that the worst mistake a young person can make today is to grow up too fast—to marry too young, to enter a full-time job too early, to bear a child too soon. Today, an early marriage is a recipe for divorce, and delayed childbearing and marriage correlate with a more stable family life.

Advice that made sense half a century ago—to join a company at a young age and work your way up the ladder—no longer applies in a radically different labor market.

Instead, it’s now clear that postsecondary education or training, internships and other efforts to build up a résumé pay off.

Here are three suggestions that make sense to me.

1. We need to provide a level of mentoring and guidance that few young people today have access to.

We need to do a much better job of helping the young identify their strengths, interests and, yes, their limitations. We need to open windows into a wide range of careers. And we need to help them chart and pursue a realistic path into the job market.

Career centers might partly assume these functions, but, if so, they must operate very differently than they do now. They must:

• Build strong relationships with local employers.
• Familiarize young people with job market demand and trends.
• Offer skills workshops that can help students master high demand skills.
• Create co-op, internship and externship opportunities at scale.

2. We need to create more jobs-first pipelines that align with labor market needs.

I am a staunch advocate of a liberal education, and wish that we as a society could provide that too many more young people. But I recognize that there are many young people who need other paths to success.

The most promising paths are pipeline programs that lead into what are now called middle-skill or new-collar jobs. These jobs may or may not need an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, but they certainly require demonstrated mastery of certain hard skills.

Examples of these jobs include CAD drafter, cloud administrator, computer network administrator, computer numerical control operator, computer programmer, computer security analyst, database manager, genetics counselor, medical records or health information technician, MRI technologist, nuclear medicine technologist, occupational health and safety specialist, and software quality assurance analyst.

Already, many community colleges offer such programs. However, prospective students need much greater transparency about employment and earning outcomes, so that they can make sure that these pipeline programs will result in the outcome they seek.

Also, it’s essential that these pipelines not become dead ends but, rather, can serve as stepping-stones, if and when an employee decides to complete an academic degree or shift to another field. The key is to design courses and programs that are stackable or that can transfer for credit.

3. We need to create more and better second-chance pathways.

What happens in your 20s shouldn’t determine your future course in life. Whether someone is re-entering the workforce after raising children or recovering from an illness or serving a prison term, there need to be second-chance paths to career success.

If such programs are to be successful, we need re-entry specialists who can provide accurate and actionable advice, accessible and highly affordable programs adapted to the needs of adults with complicated lives, and greater assurance that these programs will lead to a rewarding job.

During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, most Protestant religious denominations in the United States began to reject the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, the belief that God had preordained each individual’s fate and had already chosen those destined for salvation. A new doctrine, emphasizing human agency, took its place. It stressed people’s capacity to shape their fate through reflection and purposive action.

Our society, however, has its own form of predestination, which is all the more pernicious because it conflicts with our commitment to equal opportunity and a level playing field. Rather than resting on divine will, predestination in this society rests on one’s skin color, family background, place of birth and schooling.

The 20s have become the pivot point when young lives take off or become locked into trajectories that too few are able to alter. That need not be. We must expand the options that are available so that many more Americans can achieve a bright future.

We need to actively reject contemporary society’s forms of predestination. Equity and fairness demand no less.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.