Consider that:

In 1970, there were about 1.5 million Americans above the age of 25 who were enrolled in some kind of school. In 2004, about 7 million people were over 25 and still in school (pdf).

In 1970, almost half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 were married. Today, 15 percent of that age group is married. (pdf)

The median age of first marriage for women is 25. In 1970, it was 20.8. I think most of the increase reflects later marriage by middle-class, college-educated women.

In 1961, about 4 percent of all first births were to mothers over the age of 30. By 1994 almost one third of first births were to mothers in their thirties or forties (and I wish I had more recent statistics).

American parents spend an average of $38,000 per child while their children are between the ages of 18 and 34–a huge downward flow of cash.*

Many young Americans are delaying the traditional markers of full adulthood (finishing school and beginning a career; marrying and having a first child), thereby transforming the third decade of their lives. They are receiving massive investments in the form of training and educational experiences, paid for in large part by Mom and Dad. They are entering a work force in which success seems to depend on education, travel, internships, and other learning experiences–so much so that it takes until nearly age 30 to start really working and building a family.

On the other hand, many Americans are not in a position to stay in school through their 20s or to receive tens of thousands of dollars in subsidies from their parents after age 18. Whereas the transition to adulthood has lengthened for middle- and upper-middle-class young people, it is no more protracted today for poor youth than it used to be. They are still on their own when they finish high school, with little investment from the government or families. They are most likely to interact with the government as members of the military or as prisoners.

It’s time, I think, to focus on the supports that working-class adults receive during their twenties, while their middle-class contemporaries are developing skills and interests.

—

*Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., Ruben G. Rumbaut, and Richard A. Settersten Jr., “On the Frontier of Adulthood,” in Settersten, Furstenberg, and Rumbaut, eds., On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2005):

(Rehoboth, MD DE) We’re at the beach for a quick Father’s Day getaway. Back online tomorrow.

CIRCLE released our analysis today of the Census Department’s 2006 voting survey. (The data were released yesterday.) We found that the turnout of young people rose to 25.5%–a low rate, admittedly, but a nice rise compared to 2002. It was also the second consecutive increase. The trend is especially impressive because turnout of the whole population hardly increased at all in 2006. The boost appears to be a youth phenomenon, caused either by the Millennials’ political consciousness or by deliberate youth turnout operations–or both.

On a personal note, I’m relieved that the estimate we released on the day after the election, based on exit polls and accompanied by lots of caveats about the margin of error, turned out to be very close, even slightly conservative.

Meanwhile, I’m helping to run a conference for “emerging scholars” who study service-learning. Each emerging scholar–a graduate student or a junior professor–presents a paper and is assigned senior mentors who are scholars or advocates. This is a deliberate effort to strengthen and diversify the next generation of scholars who study a form of education that appears, at the least, to be highly promising.

I’m going to New Hampshire just for today to speak at City Year’s annual conference, which is called “cygyzy” (that’s Greek for “a rare alignment of celestial bodies”). City Year, a part of Americorps, is a full-time program for about 1,200 young adults–some on a college track, and some not–who work in teams on service projects. With characteristic savvy, City Year is holding cygyzy ’07 in New Hampshire during the presidential primary season and has lined up Bill Clinton, Judd Gregg, Jim Lehrer, and various other luminaries as keynote speakers.

Fittingly, I’ll speak to a smaller group; and I’m planning to make the following argument:

We have traditionally defined and defended programs such as City Year as “voluntary service.” That seems politically smart–who’s against service? Accordingly, we have justified City Year in two main ways. First, it’s supposed to be a very cost-effective–in fact, downright cheap–means of providing social services, such as mentoring and camp counseling for disadvantaged kids. Second, it’s supposed to benefit the City Year volunteers, who acquire leadership skills and probably gain psychological benefits, too. Looked at that way, the City Year volunteers are actually the recipients of “services”–again, at low cost.

These justifications are problematic. Maybe City Year provides cheap services, but its corps members are paid, in part with federal funds. Doesn’t the taxpayer get an even better deal from completely unpaid voluntary service? The Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs Americorps, likes to note that Americans give away $152 billion in services every year by volunteering. If we are primarily interested in how much “service” Americans generate, $152 billion of free labor utterly dwarfs City Year’s federal funding and renders the program rather trivial.

Likewise, the benefits to the corps members seem beside the point. They don’t volunteer to gain leadership skills. They are “putting idealism to work.”

So I want to make a much bigger claim for City Year. Its corps members are not engaged in voluntary service; they are citizen workers. America desperately needs citizen workers, and City Year provides a model, a training program, and a laboratory.

The word “citizen” bothers some of us because it excludes immigrants, who can obviously benefit their communities even if they aren’t naturalized. At the same time, it includes George W. Bush, Bill Gates, and your local school superintendent; but we don’t mean them when we think of “citizen work.” Still, it’s the best word I can think of for an active member of the national community, someone who has standing, dignity, and the ability to contribute simply by virtue of belonging. If you’re born or naturalized in the USA, you don’t have to qualify for citizenship by getting specialized training or credentials or by obtaining a special office. You are a citizen by right.

But citizens who do “citizen work” are not merely people who belong to the community. They contribute actively. They may be pursuing a whole career of public service, contributing occasionally as part of their jobs, or giving unpaid time after work. They not only provide services, but also help to define problems in discussion with other citizens. The develop and implement plans for addressing those problems.

Today, America faces grievous challenges, such as a high school dropout rate of one third, homeland security threats, and global warming.

America has never overcome any major challenge without tapping the skills, energies, and passions of millions of our citizens. Citizen work is the genius of American democracy.

But citizen work is in decline. People are substantially less likely to work on community projects or to attend meetings than they were a generation ago. This is why programs like City Year are so important: as models of a different kind of politics.

(Providence, RI) I don’t come here very often, but I’m developing a habit of ruminating about America whenever I walk around this city’s historic core. Not only did Providence play an important role in our founding, but there is something classically American about the old houses near Brown University. They were built in the same style that was current in Britain at the time–“Federalist” is just the American version of “Regency”–but their white picket fences and front lawns belong only in this country. Their classical details evoke the ideals of a young commercial republic.

It’s an ambiguous legacy. I have previously described John Brown, who built one of those fine houses and helped to found Brown University as well as the United States, and who could rightly be called “slave trader … and patriot.” It was one of his descendants, I believe, who built the John Carter Brown Library over whose ionic marble lintel is chiseled the word “Americana.” As I walk, I think of two other Providence figures: Roger Williams, prophet of peace and religious toleration and founder of the city, and Ruth Simmons, the current President of Brown University. Dr. Simmons, 12th child of Texas sharecroppers, leads the institution that John Brown founded with slave money.

This time, I arrived in Providence on a Peter Pan bus that carried its share of lost souls. In the bus depot, people looked strung out. I had come from an intense conference in which many participants were alarmed and furious about the state of our democracy. Even before the conference, I had been thinking about urban America and the startling evidence of exclusion. People whose ancestors came to America as John Brown’s property are now filling our state prisons literally by the million. No other country imprisons so many.

Yet Brown and its surroundings represent freedom and excellence. Those buildings are very fine; and quite diverse people walk among them, use their resources, and even find distinguished places within them. I feel more alienated than usual from “Americana,” and that feeling is mixed with nostalgia, because once I had a less complicated relationship to the Republic and its early history. But I refuse to give up on the ideals of Roger Williams and Ruth Simmons or the beautiful communities that Americans have–sometimes–built.