The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School (review)

Tim Clydesdale’s The First Year Out is a highly readable, compassionate, and empathetic look at the lives of young people as they leave high school and enter universities, colleges, vocational schools, and employment. With a more rigorous theoretical framework and analysis, it could have been a brilliant book.

Early on, Clydesdale sets himself the goal of describing the unique American moral culture that shapes the lives and attitudes of mainstream American teens. He asks how teens go from highly structured lives as high school students to more autonomous post-high-school activities, and how these transitions are influenced by their parents, their peers, their educational experiences, their faith, and their communities more generally. He answers these questions with rich data from different sources, although at the core of the book are 50 young people he interviewed during their last year of high school and re-interviewed at the end of their first year out.

What makes Clydesdale’s book interesting is the way in which he uses his interview data to confirm and reject stereotypes. Yes, teens have sex and get drunk and stoned at parties, but not nearly as much as adults suspect. Many of the teenagers Clydesdale interviewed showed remarkably mature (and conventional) attitudes about relationships, substance abuse, and sexual activity. They want their relationships to be meaningful, they recognize the dangers of excessive substance abuse, and they quickly realize that greater independence comes with greater (usually financial) responsibilities. These findings, straight from the mouths of young people themselves, provide a very refreshing antidote to recent concerns about young people delaying maturity and becoming stuck in a neverland of perpetual youth.

Here, however, is where it all gets rather depressing. It appears that teens in their first year out quickly and almost exclusively become concerned with the micro-management of their lives, at the expense of personal and intellectual growth and concern for the larger community in which they live. The majority of the teens Clydesdale interviewed left high school politically disinterested, without any substantial intellectual curiosity, unaware of global economic and political conditions, and exclusively concerned with utilitarian pursuits, such as buying stuff and getting a degree (not learning). Almost all remained equally ignorant and utilitarian when Clydesdale re-interviewed them after their first year out.

Clydesdale is obviously concerned about the implications of this disengagement for American civil life. Not even the cataclysmic events of September 11 and the Columbine high school shooting—both of which occurred when these young people made their crucial transitions from high school—shook the teenagers out of their apathy. Although the teens were affected by these events temporarily, he could not find anybody for whom these events altered their outlook on life, made them more aware, or sparked a political interest. Instead, the dangers and confusion posed by these events led the young people to retreat further into their micro-worlds of relationships and shopping. This is a depressing but hardly surprising observation.

Clydesdale locates the reason for this behaviour and attitude in a powerful and hegemonic American moral culture, which, amongst other things, celebrates individual achievement, values loyalty to family, has an unquestioned patriotism, and suggests that happiness and fulfillment are found in personal relationships and consumption. Clearly, despite public discourses of teen rebellion and delayed maturity, teens have always been much more like their parents than different from them. The political disengagement and anti-intellectualism of these teenagers is simply a reflection of the same conditions in the American psyche.

Having been raised in a Christian fundamentalist home and having attended an evangelical college himself, Clydesdale turns to religion and faith as a possible (albeit unlikely) avenue to penetrate this anti-intellectual, hedonistic, consumer-oriented culture. The few participants in his study he identifies as very religious were indeed more interested in the world and their place in it. Their education in religious-based US colleges seems to...