Are our high schoolers all right?
It’s the ultimate question for parents, policymakers, and K-12 educators. Student academic progress, mental health, and higher education have all yet to recover from pandemic disruption.
Now the landscape has steadied enough to get a sense of how a new generation of students are transitioning from high school into young adulthood.
Preparing Students for What’s Next
The pathways to college, internships, and work have changed. What does that mean for secondary education? Explore the series.
Overall, the picture shows both some bright spots and some areas for concern. And all of the findings raise questions for those working in the critical transitional period of high school, plus the first few years beyond: What is the best way to put all students on a path to financial security and fulfilling work?
On the bright side, young adults today are better situated than their parents’ generation. They have higher college-going and employment rates than their parents 30 years ago. They also have been more civically engaged than their counterparts from a decade ago: According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, half of 18- to 29-year-olds voted in the 2020 presidential election—up 11 percentage points from the 2016 election cycle—and 57 percent have said they are “extremely likely to vote” in the November election.
But that has not necessarily translated to a stronger launch into adulthood. The burden of both education and housing debt has more than doubled for young adults under 30, compared to their parents’ generation 30 years ago. And some experts warn the focus on postsecondary education is preparing more students for college but not for work and life beyond that.
“People are dating later, getting houses later ... they’re focused on school instead,” said Jeff Strohl, a research professor and the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
That has pushed the average age for a young adult to “settle into a career"—as opposed to hopping among entry-level jobs—from about age 25 a generation ago to 32 today, Strohl said.
“There’s a lot more churning in and out of different pathways, and … youth don’t have good ways to connect to employment and careers,” he said.
The patterns have long-term effects. Fewer than half of young people ages 18-34 are financially independent from their parents—and 57 percent still live with them, up 5 percentage points since 1993, according to a 2024 study by the Pew Research Center.
Young adults begin their own families later, too. Among adults under 25, only 7 percent are married or have at least one child—less than half as many who had started a family among their parents’ generation. Only about 30 percent marry, and about 1 in 4 have a child by age 30—both roughly 20 percentage points less than the share in 1993, Pew found.
The factors that shape these patterns are complex, involving both sociological elements reflecting young people’s values, and economic ones like skyrocketing home prices. But they also have implications for schools, which is why Education Week has launched its new reporting project, The High School Handoff. The series will explore how secondary education prepares students to enter adulthood, from college and careers to the workforce to being responsible members of the community.
Here’s a look at where we are now.
1. High school graduation rates rose until the pandemic
A decade ago, experts bemoaned young adults’ “failure to launch,” warning they were entering the workforce and family life later. The resulting discussion spurred many states and districts to focus on boosting high school graduation rates and create dual-credit programs and career-themed “pathways” intended to give students a leg up on college and work.
By at least some measures, these efforts have worked. The share of incoming high school freshmen who graduated on time four years later (known as the “adjusted cohort graduation rate”) ticked up steadily throughout the 2010s, to 86 percent in 2018-19.
During and since the pandemic, however, the picture has been murkier: States eased or waived many time, coursework, and other graduation requirements, and have been slower to provide annual data to the federal Education Department, leading it to infer graduation data for several states in 2019-20 and beyond.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which use a longer time period, suggest a more conservative picture of the success of state initiatives to boost high school graduation. That agency estimates that about 1 in 5 young adults ages 16 to 24 in 2023 had left high school school without a diploma. Men were more likely to drop out than women.
2. Dual credit and ‘pathways’ caught on. But not everyone benefits
More students today opt to get a jump start on college while still in high school. Nearly 2.5 million students participated in dual credit in high school in 2022-23, the most recent year for which data are available.
That number is a milestone in part because the collection, from the U.S. Department of Education, is the very first actual college-level count of dual enrollment. Prior estimates were based on age, which makes establishing trends in this area challenging. One such prior estimate, in fall of 2021, figured that about 1.5 million students were dual credit and that those figures steadily rose over a decade. A separate federal study, based on high school transcript data from 23,000 students nationwide who started 9th grade in 2009 (and presumably graduated in 2012), found that 34 percent took at least one postsecondary course while in high school.
So what we do know is that, in general, dual credit has been increasing. —
Schools in all 50 states and at least 78 percent of schools nationwide now offer at least one dual-credit course, up from 48 states offering such programs in 2021.
(“Dual credit” and “dual-" or “concurrent enrollment” generally refer to partnerships between districts and one or more colleges, in which students earn some college credit, rather than full early-college high schools or participation in independent national programs such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate that colleges can accept for credit.)
“The impact of dual enrollment is pretty positive: It helps students graduate high school at higher rates and transition to college at higher rates,” said Jason Taylor, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Utah and a dual-credit researcher. “But access to dual enrollment continues to be stratified by race, income, family background, and other demographic demographic characteristics.”
And while studies show earning college credit in high school can help students matriculate into college, on average those credits don’t save students much in time or student loan debt. That’s because students rarely earn credit in courses needed for a major; they typically earn them in general electives and the dual-credits save students on average less than a semester of college class time.
“We need to not just offer any dual-enrollment courses, but high-quality dual-enrollment courses that are well taught and aligned to students’ interests after high school,” said John Fink, a senior research associate for the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. “We need alignment that is really tapping into students’ talent and motivation and aspirations.”
Even when students have access to high-quality dual-credit programs, they often do not get guidance about the academic and workplace requirements of particular fields until it’s too late, said Julie Lemmers, the senior vice president of advocacy for American Student Assistance, a national nonprofit focused on helping young people learn about college and careers.
“We need to start having career conversations with young people much earlier in their trajectory, at the time young people are still open to possibilities,” Lemmers said. “If they don’t see themselves in science by 8th grade, STEM careers come off the table.”
3. College-going rates have fallen, while enrollment in certificate programs is increasing
There’s some evidence to suggest more young adults are looking for alternatives to the traditional college path after high school, in part because of the cost and time needed for advanced degrees.
College-going rates dropped precipitously at the start of the pandemic, when most campuses moved online only. But that dive continued a more gradual decline in college-going over the last decade, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The gender divide also widened: Women have mostly returned to pre-pandemic college-going rates, but men haven’t done the same.
Young people also increasingly favor short-term and ongoing education programs. From fall 2022 to fall 2023, the number of students earning undergraduate certificate programs rather than traditional two or four-year degrees rose nearly 10 percent according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s 2023 higher education enrollment update. These programs focus on industry skills, such as information technology, emergency management, and even education leadership, and often are designed to be “stacked” over the course of a worker’s career.
Cost plays a big role in the decision to attend and stay in college. The Education Data Initiative finds that on average, students in 2024 racked up nearly $38,000 in debt to pursue a bachelor’s degree, with many expecting to take up to 20 years to pay it off. The recent debacle over the Education Department’s revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid has delayed financial aid and turned off many low-income families from college.
But Fink said high schools and colleges also need to do more to help students make the social-emotional transition to college, from independent living and study skills to setting goals for their careers and finances.
“Once students figure out how to be college students, they can do better,” Fink said. “But a lot of supports are needed right up front to help students acclimate to those college expectations.”
4. Employment has increased, but is often delayed until after college
In part because of greater educational attainment, young adults ages 18 to 24 are more likely to be employed full-time than the generation of 30 years ago. They also had higher median earnings, $20,000 per year in 2023 versus $15,462 in 1993, after adjusting for inflation.
However, young adults have become less likely to work while they are still in school, potentially giving them a more abrupt entry to the working world once they earn their degrees.
“I think we don’t give young people enough credit for what they can do,” Lemmers said. “One of the challenges that we always see when we talk to employers is that, you know, ‘The stuff we’re doing is way too sophisticated for a 16- or 17-year-old.’ But young people do tend to step up and are able to do a lot of basic skills that we would expect an entry-level employee to be able to do, when we give them the opportunity to do so.”
