Time Magazine made their cover story about the “Twixers”, twenty-somethings that don’t settle down, don’t move on with their lives, and often still live at home with their parents.

Michele, Ellen, Nathan, Corinne, Marcus and Jennie are friends. All of them live in Chicago. They go out three nights a week, sometimes more. Each of them has had several jobs since college; Ellen is on her 17th, counting internships, since 1996. They don’t own homes. They change apartments frequently. None of them are married, none have children. All of them are from 24 to 28 years old.

Thirty years ago, people like Michele, Ellen, Nathan, Corinne, Marcus and Jennie didn’t exist, statistically speaking. Back then, the median age for an American woman to get married was 21. She had her first child at 22. Now it all takes longer. It’s 25 for the wedding and 25 for baby. It appears to take young people longer to graduate from college, settle into careers and buy their first homes. What are they waiting for? Who are these permanent adolescents, these twentysomething Peter Pans? And why can’t they grow up?

They can’t grow up, because we won’t let them. Humans are biologically and intellectually ready to be adults in their early to mid-teens but in our efforts to shelter, confine and infantilize teens we have destroyed the traditional mechanisms for transition to adulthood. Old milestones like a Bar Mitzvah or high school graduation have lost meaning and have yet to find a replacement. The process of becoming an adult, once straightforward has become a cruel joke. One age restriction after another makes sure teenagers live their lives as children. Is it any surprise now that twenty-somethings behave like teenagers?

Society has reaped what it’s sown. After a decade of trying to grow up, trying to be adult, trying to exert control over their lives, at long last twenty-somethings have given up and given in to the demands of the institutions and adults who guide their lives. If instead of shunning them, we welcomed teens into larger society by breaking down the ever growing bars on our cribs, we will see far better adjusted, far better capable citizens of this nation. Citizens ready to take on all the adult responsibilities they are expected to.

The Time article does hit on something important. Namely the ubiquity and thus loss of value in a college degree.

Meanwhile, those expensive, time-sucking college diplomas have become worth less than ever. So many more people go to college now–a 53% increase since 1970–that the value of a degree on the job market has been diluted. The advantage in wages for college-degree holders hasn’t risen significantly since the late 1990s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To compensate, a lot of twixters go back to school for graduate and professional degrees. Swann, for example, is planning to head back to business school to better his chances in the insurance game. But piling on extra degrees costs precious time and money and pushes adulthood even further into the future.

I see this often with my friends. Having been told our entire lives that the keys to the kingdom are given with a college degree, we find that not much has changed upon graduation and decide to try again - with more schooling. The article also discusses the debt caused by college loans that makes financial independence far more difficult for “twixers”. This of course is caused by the sky-rocketing cost of higher education, which is caused, in large part, by the sky-rocketing demand for college. I’ll discuss the breakdown of college at a later point, but it serves a role in delaying the full acceptance of adult responsibilities.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 25th, 2005 at 10:35 am and is filed under Youth Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.