CHAPTER 14
The Transition to Adulthood
Challenges of Poverty and Structural Lag
STEPHEN F. HAMILTON AND MARY AGNES HAMILTON
This chapter discusses the transition of
adolescents to adulthood. It is more speculative
than empirical because the issues we raise
regarding the transition to adulthood have not
been extensively studied. It is grounded in two
observations: The transition to adulthood is
central to both the reproduction of the social
class hierarchy and the alleviation of poverty,
and the transition is fundamentally institutional.
These two observations generate our
framing question: How can the institutions
supporting the transition to adulthood more
effectively contribute to overcoming poverty?
The United States is our primary point of reference,
but we include data and institutions from
other countries as well. We rely on, but do not
attempt to summarize or reproduce, the rich
material in the excellent volumes on the transition
to adulthood in the United States, edited
by Furstenberg, Rumbaut. and Settersten
(2005), and globally, edited by Lloyd (2005).
Chapter 17 in this Handbook complements this
one, especially by calling attention to contrary
trends in the transition to adulthood viewed
globally, variation both within and across
nations and cultures, and variation by gender.
The transition to adulthood is pivotal in the
reproduction of socioeconomic status (SES)
and in social and economic mobility. If young
people who have grown up in poverty are
to rise above the SES of their parents, their
best chance to do so, or at least to move on
the path in that direction, is at the transition
to adulthood. Children's SES is secondhand; it
492
is determined directly by that of their parents.
In societies that allow social mobility, adults'
SES depends on their own education and
employment. Of course, young adults carry
with them an array of assets related to SES
bequeathed to them by their parents, but their
SES is attributed to them based on their own
characteristics, not automatically extended to
them based on their parents' SES, as in an aristocracy.
Therefore, social mobility (in either
direction) depends critically on what happens
at the transition to adulthood. Overcoming
poverty clearly requires attention to the needs
of young children, but the transition to adulthood
is when most people either begin to
rise above their status at birth or fail to do so,
because the capacity to be economically productive
is largely set by the time young people
become adults.
THE LONG AND VARIED
TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD
The transition to adulthood is defined by
changes in institutional roles and relationships.
Adults, in the standard scenario, have left
their parents' household and established their
own. They have married and become parents.
They have completed full-time education and
are employed full time. Listing these changes
immediately calls attention to variations. First,
by the age of 30 or 35, nearly everyone is
considered adult even without having taken
any of these steps. Second, rather than being
required, every step is increasingly optional.
Divorce, cohabitation, and same-sex couples
increase the variety of household options.
Third, what was once considered an ideal
· sequence of steps no longer matches reality.
Children are born before marriage. Education
and employment alternate in all combinations
of full and part time. Fourth, each of these
steps is in some senses reversible. The parents'
· home serves as a refuge for young adults who
had previously moved away and completed
their educations, perhaps following a divorce
or loss of a job. Parenthood is not completely
reversible, but even parental responsibilities
can be formally relinquished through adoption
or informally turned over to a grandparent. In
addition to varying in sequence and universality,
the timing of these markers of adulthood
varies among individuals, groups, and historical
periods (Modell, 1989).
Adolescence is defined by a biological
process, puberty, just as the differences
between infancy and early ehildhood and the
other stages of childhood are marked by vis·
ible physiological changes. In contrast, the
transition to adulthood is defined by changes
in social roles, notably within the institutions
of family, education. employment, and civil
society. The markers of adulthood listed above
constitute a shift from being dependent upon
parents or parent substitutes for basic needs to
being capable ofcaring for selfand others. This
shift from dependency to being depended upon
is structured by the institutions of education,
employment, civil society, and the familyfamilies
of origin and the new families formed
by new adults. No other life-course transition
is so fully defined by social institutions as the
transition from adolescence t() adulthood.
Consider an 18-year-old and a 28-year-old.
Physiologically, both are fully mature, capable
of reproduction. Yet in the United States,
few 18-year-olds are considered fully adult,
despite legal rights and obligations associated
with the age, and most 28-year-olds are, even
if they have not achieved all the markers of
adulthood. The centrality of institutional roles
is illustrated by extreme cases, as when an
The Long And Varied Trdnsition To Adulthood 493
18-year-old is already a parent living in her own
apartment and employed full time while her
unmarried 28-year-old sister is living at home
and attending college classes. The institutional
nature of the transition to adulthood explains
why it is reasonable to claim that the transition
has grown longer around the world (Arnett,
2004; Lloyd, 2005) with no concomitant
change in the timing of physical maturation.
The lengthening period of time when young
people are physically mature and capable of
reproduction but not yet acting like and treated
as adults reflects changes in employment
that increasingly reward extended education.
MalTiage and parenthood are delayed to allow
more years of education. The change is all
the more dramatic for involving young women
as well as men. If young women were not able
to take advantage of both advanced education
and the employment opportunities it affords,
then older ages at marriage might be observed
only among men, or, conceivably, women
might marry students who were supported
economically by their families. Simultaneous
increases in marriage age for both women and
men indicate increasing gender equality. The
growing participation of women in higher
education and in paid employment serves as
a reminder too that the lengthening transition
to adulthood results not only from impersonal
economic forces but also from choices young
people make. Control over fertility and the
separation of sexual relations from marriage,
which entail individual choices, also contribute
to lengthening the transition.
Delayed marriage is widely cited as the
principal indicator that the transition to adulthood
is being prolonged in the United States
and around the world. With few exceptions,
notably in South America, where age at first
marriage was already high in comparison to
other countries, both women and men are marrying
later as the twenty-first century dawns
than in previous decades (Lloyd, 2005, p. ). A
compelling and mostly upbeat story explains
this phenomenon. Jobs paying enough to
support a family increasingly require more
494 The Transition to Adulthood
formal education. Young people accordingly
remain in school longer to acquire the credentials
they will need to support a family.
But the story is more complicated than
that. Marrying later has a different impact
and a different meaning for Japanese women,
who are able to enjoy unprecedented personal
freedom and employment opportunities, than
for Egyptian men, who are unable to marry
because they cannot earn the money needed to
pay for a wedding, much less to support a family
(Lloyd, 2005, pp. 442-443). Marriage can
be postponed to provide for the accumulation
of additional human capital, but it can also be
postponed simply because young people lack
the resources to establish a new household.
These two sources of the same phenomenon
can reflect quite different personal situations.
Young people from very poor backgrounds
may be unable to take advantage of the educational
opportunities that would improve their
long-term life prospects. Lack of money to pay
for education and living expenses interferes
with continued schooling. Yet the same lack of
money makes marriage impossible or at best
unwise. Young people in this situation may
be in a prolonged transition to adulthood, but
they will have to complete the transition without
the support of educational institutions and
without the added human capital that education
provides. In contrast to the developmentenhancing
nature of an extended transition as
often described (Arnett, 2004), this situation
seems like a delayed or blocked transition.
Some young people may acquire added human
capital in the form of work experience and job
skills, but others simply mark time. The same
objective condition--delayed marriage~an
yield significant benefits to one group of
young people, those who are not married
because they are enrolled in school, and none
for another group, who are unemployed or
working to survive in low-skilled jobs without
receiving any benefits from the freedom they
enjoy from adult responsibilities.
Another delayed marriage scenario is in
some ways even more poignant. In some
African and Middle Eastern countries
have invested heavily in higher
without building strong economies,
people postpone marriage to complete
education but after graduation take jobs
shopkeepers and taxi drivers because of a mismatch
between the education system and the
labor market. In these cases, the postponement
of marriage in favor of higher education lead~
to further postponement of marriage because
of poverty.
Delayed marriage is an excellent example
of historical change in the patterns of lives.
According to Elder (1999, p. 302), "The life
course refers to a pattern of socially defined,
age-graded events and roles which is subject
to historical change in culture and social structure."
Elder (1999, p. 306) goes on to identify
timing as one of the key principles in the
life course perspective: "The developmental
impact of a succession of life transitions or
events is contingent on when they occur in a
person's life." Transitions can be normatively
"on-time" or "off-time." Young people who
marry today at an age that was appropriate
or "on-time" for their parents and grandparents
are now "otT-time." Off-time transitions
pose special challenges and "early" marriage
is an excellent illustration. Young people who
go against the norms and marry (or produce
children without marriage) have a more difficult
time economically because they must
cope with the same dearth of well-paid jobs
that leads most of their age-mates to postpone
marriage and because marriage makes school
enrollment more difficult.
Choosing early marriage is one way to
shorten the transition to adulthood. And we
must remember that some continue to do so
even as the trends shift (Carr & Kefalas, 2006).
There is another set of young people who are
forced by poverty to assume adult responsibilities
prematurely, interfering with their opportunities
to improve their life chances. Very
poor families are not only unable to finance
higher education, they may expect older teenagers
to become independent or even to earn
money to contribute to the family. Foster
children are a special case; they are required
by Jaw to become financially independent at
age 18, when middle-class youth are relying
on their parents to finance their higher education
(Schoeni & Ross. 2005; see also Osgood,
Foster, Flanagan, & Ruth, 2006). Young women
from poor families may be expected to care for
young children or disabled adults, delaying
or foregoing education, employment, civic
engagement, and marriage.
In view of all these possibilities, it is incorrect
to interpret the trend toward delayed marriage
as having the same consequences for all
who experience it. And it is important to consider
the negative consequences that normative
changes in marriage age can have on those who
marry early or assume other adult responsibilities
prematurely. Part of a prolonged transition
to adulthood is continued reliance on parents
after reaching physical maturity. When parents
are too poor to aid their grown children,
the benefits of a prolonged transition are unattainable
and the norms favoring it further disadvantage
the poor. Education is the institution
most implicated in both the opportunities and
the barriers.
STRUCTURAL LAG AND
le INEQUALITY
f- Riley, Kahn, and Foner (1994) introduced the
st useful construct of "structural lag" to des­
)S
ignate challenges facing people at the age
Ie of retirement and beyond whose wishes and
al actions no longer conform to expectations for
their age group or to the affordances of the
to institutions they inhabit. Rather than terminat.e
ing work entirely and devoting themselves to
leisure, many people of "retirement age" coni).
tinue to work, often part time, and to engage
re in significant voluntary service. Defined most
11­ succinctly by Hareven (1994, p. 130), strucIf-
tural lag is "the mismatch between changing
ry lives and changing social structures." Like
;e Settersten (2005) we believe structural lag
[}applies
to the beginning of adulthood as well
m as it does to aging. Changes in the transition
Structural Lag And Inequality 495
to adulthood have not been matched by appropriate
changes in the institutions that support
that transition. Serious mismatch results when
those institutions no longer provide the support
that is needed for a large proportion of the
young people who are becoming adults.
We believe the institutions that shape and
support entry into adulthood have failed to keep
pace with changes in the transition to adulthood,
making it more perilous for many than in
the past. Those who make full use of the wellfunctioning
institutions, notably selective residential
colleges, generally do quite well. Those
who for whatever reason do not rely on such
institutions have a much more difficult time.
The problem is that the kinds of jobs that once
enabled young men and women who did not
graduate from higher education to earn a decent
living have disappeared. The gap has been
inadequately filled with low-wage, low-skill,
part-time, short-term jobs (Osterman, 1980). In
the worst case, just as with retired people, rolelessness
results, the state of having no significant
responsibilities in social institutions. This
situation is a sad waste of energy, talent, and
wisdom, whether it befalls our elders or our
young people. Rolelessness or disconnectedness
in youth tends to lead to problem behavior,
especially for young men (Chinman & Linney,
1998; Nightingale & Wolverton, 1993).
Institutional adaptation and invention are
needed to strengthen support for the transition
to adulthood among the most disadvantaged.
The term institution applies to formal organizations
and to customs and practices. Hence,
schools and families are both institutions. As
noted above, the institutions most germane
to the transition to adulthood include family,
education, civil society, and employment.
Government at all levels is also implicated as
a source of laws and policies and as a sponsor
of educational and other institutions. Not-forprofit
organizations and profit-making businesses
contribute as employers and as sources
of opportunity. Inclusion of these institutions
serves as a reminder that adulthood entails new
roles not only as workers and family members
496 The Transition to Adulthood
but also as cltlzens. Although it is not true
as often stated that youth are "citizens of the
future"-citizenship is confened by birth or
naturalization, not by reaching voting age-the
rights and responsibilities ofcitizenship increase
at adulthood, not only by the addition of voting
but by qualification to serve in public office
and by the acquisition of civic competence that
both enables and compels civic engagement
(Verba. Schlozman, & Brady, 1995).
Examples of institutions supporting the transition
to adulthood include families of origin,
higher education and apprenticeship, the military,
and some forms of service (e.g., the Peace
Corps, AmeriCorps, CityYear. YouthBuild,
Service and Conservation Corps, and certain
religious missions). Structural lag occurs
when such institutions are not available to all
who can benefit from them and when those
in them no longer gain the benefits they need
from them. Families of origin can be stressed
by the financial needs of young people whose
education continues longer than expected or
who complete their education but are unable
to find employment paying enough to support
themselves. The rise of cohabitation in Europe
and the United States suggests that traditional
maniage no longer matches the needs and
expectations of many young people who would
previously have been expected to marry. Nonenrollment
and high dropout rates in secondary
school and higher education indicate mismatch
between prospective students and education.
But, most important of all, persistent poverty
demonstrates the failure of institutions to provide
pathways of upward mobility at the time
of life when they are most needed.
We are especially interested in educational
and employment institutions and in the governmental
and nongovernmental institutions
of civil society. Families are clearly important,
but they are less amenable to intentional
change. Before examining some of these
institutions, we propose a set of developmental
assets that we believe are particularly needed
by young people as they assume adult roles and
responsibilities as workers and active citizens.
Considering the employment and civic
roles of adults, and the contributions of education
to enabling their performance, two
generalizations are valid, allowing for the
variety already acknowledged. One, echoing
the work of Riley, Kahn, and Foner (1994)
and others on aging, is that the previous
(ideal) sequence of learning-work-Ieisure, or
education-employment-retirement no longer
holds for many people. Education is increasingly
a recurring activity rather than something
one grows out of. Young people and elderly people
work, perhaps part time, in combination with
schooling and other activities. Hence, although
we think of education as preparing young people
for adulthood, it is also true that adults participate
in education and that students who are not
yet adults work and participate in civil society.
The second generalization is that the assets
or competencies demanded by contemporary
workplaces increasingly overlap with those
needed in civil socicty. Although the hopes for
a steady march toward worldwide democracy
that were spawned by the fall of the Soviet
Union have proved premature at best, with
Russia reverting to autocracy and China managing
to embrace capitalism in economics whilc
retaining tight control over its people, the world
today offers far more opportunities for ordinary
people to act as responsible citizens than
it did a few decades ago. As a result, a larger
proportion of the world's population can make
use of civic competencies such as the ability to
analyze and discuss public issues, the ability
to work in groups, and the ability to plan and
carry out civic actions, in addition to general
social and communicative competencies. These
same competencies, with different content, are
increasingly valued in workplaces where information
and communication take precedence
over making things (Reich, 200 I).
DEVELOPMENTALASSETS FOR
YOUNG ADULTS
The metaphor of "developmental assets" has
been employed by the Search Institute as a
conceptual tool for organizing communities to
promote positive youth development (Benson,
Scales, Hamilton, & Sesma, 2006; Scales &
Leffert, 2004). It was subsequently adopted
and refined by the Committee on CommunityLevel
Programs for Youth of the National
Research Council and Institutes of Medicine
(Eccles & Gootman, 2002). We adopt the same
metaphor here, but apply it to development
during the transition to adulthood, emphasizing
selected assets that are especially critical during
this stage of life and for successful performance
of adult roles as workers and citizens. We do
not attempt to be comprehensive, as Search
Institute and Eccles and Gootman were.
We believe the assets most distinctive to
this time of life, and to this time in history, can
be grouped in three clusters:
I. Sense of purpose and agency
2. Human capital
3. Social capital
These assets are not unique to adults;
indeed, sense of purpose and personal power
are two of the assets constituting "positive
identity" among the Search Institute's
40 assets, and both human capital and social
capital are implied by other assets in the Search
Institute list. However, these assets take on
additional importance and somewhat different
form during the transition to adulthood, when
either building or failing to build these assets
is exceptionally significant for the remainder
of the life course. It is important to keep in
mind that developmental assets, like financial
ones, are continuous, not dichotomous. The
question is not whether one has an asset but to
what extent, and in what forms, and how the
asset can be deployed. The analogy to financial
assets eventually breaks down because
there is no easy way to count how much of a
developmental asset a person has. But imprecise
quantitative comparisons are possible; it
is reasonable to claim that some people have
a stronger sense of purpose than others, to
describe the ways in which that stronger sense
Developmental Assets for Young Adults· 497
of purpose is demonstrated, and to assess the
consequences of the difference.
Sense of Purpose and Agency
Having a sense of purpose entails finding
meaning in life and having a set of principles
to live by. Religious beliefs and moral principles
are essential to many in answering such
questions. Having a life plan, a direction, is a
major part of a sense of purpose.
Rawls (1971, p. 408) attributed to Josiah
Royce the idea that "a person may be regarded
as a human life lived according to a plan." For
Rawls, a life plan is essential to humanity and
a touchstone for determining what is rational
and what is good (pp. 407-416). A life plan
should not be construed as detailed and rigid.
It is unrealistic for anyone to project too much
too far into the future. Rather, it is a set of
goals based on values and aspirations with at
least some of the intermediate steps filled in; it
helps to guide a person's choices but is subject
to change in response to unanticipated obstacles
and opportunities. The value and meaning
of having a life plan depend on being in a society
that affords enough personal freedom so
that choices are possible and enough stability
so that the future is partly predictable.
In his classic long-term longitudinal study,
American Lives, Clausen (1993) found that
"planful competence" characterized those
people, even in adolescence, who as adults
became most successful, not only in educational
and occupational attainment and earnings,
but also in marital stability and life
satisfaction. Planfulness is an approach to
life based on conscious assessment of opportunities
and resources, not a simple a priori
mapping of one's life. Planful people do not
always know what is coming but they use the
best information they can find to prepare for
the future. In the Sloan study of the transition
from adolescence to the adulthood, Schneider
and Stevenson (1999) found that young people
with "aligned ambitions" were most likely to
achieve their educational and vocational goals,
meaning that their plans and expectations for
498 The Transition to Adulthood
education were congruent with their vocational
interests and plans. Those who either underestimated
or overestimated the amount of education
they would need to achieve their career
goals were less likely to achieve them.
In societies where vocations and marital
partners as well as the timing of transitions are
mostly established by tradition and by families
rather than by individual choice, a sense
of purpose is based on meeting those expectations
and often by traditional religious beliefs.
A life plan under such circumstances is highly
constrained by gender, by social class, and by
the few possibilities that exist. As the number
of options grows, the need for an individual
plan increases as does the complexity and contingency
of plans. Institutions can constrain
possibilities during the transition to adulthood,
but institutions that function well in today's
world support young people in making use of
proliferating options and their growing freedom
to choose.
Ideally, purpose extends beyond oneself and
one's family to incorporate the well-being ofothers
and broader social goals. Youniss and Yates
(1999. p. 365), who have studied youth involvement
in service, suggest that their research
"may provide some insight into the process by
which long-term social orientations are initially
shaped." This process includes giving youth the
opportunity to act in accordance with religious,
political, or other ideological traditions of caring
and commitment. "This form of morality is
expressed when adults join voluntary associations
that are focused on explicit causes which
promote community well-being...." (Youniss
& Yates, 1999, p. 365).
Agency is related to planfulness but is distinguishable.
In life-course theory, agency is
the capacity of a person to shape her or his
own life course (Elder, 1999). A young man in
a neighborhood plagued by gang violence, for
example, might decide to enlist in the military
as a way of getting away from the temptations
and the dangers of that environment, gaining
vocational skills and obtaining financial aid
for higher education. This illustrates initiative,
self-efficacy, or internal locus of control,
in addition to being a near-term decision to
away from a bad environment, it is also a
term decision to enter a different kind of
path that opens previously unavailable
tunities. More broadly, agency is defined as
belief that one can act effectively; in this
it is similar to self-efficacy and internal
of control. Without a sense of agency,
ning seems pointless. If one is at the
of immutable forces, then survival is
planning is supert1uous. Increasing
ity in many parts of the world combined
declining returns to traditional
and crafts make agency far more important
more people than in the past. As opportunities
grow for living and working in new places,
doing new things, those with a stronger sense
of agency are better able to avoid the poverty
they would face if they did not change,
and to exploit the new opportunities available
to them. Agency is critical in market economies.
To thrive or even just survive in labor
markets in which employers and jobs disappear
rapidly, workers must be able to reinvent
themselves quickly (Reich, 2001).
In the field of youth development, the goal of
fostering agency is often discussed in terms
of youth voice or youth participation in activities
or programs, not for survival. Whatever
the context, agency grows when youth have
choices about what they do and opportunities
to take leadership and make decisions about
how programs will operate. Youth-initiated
programs are the ultimate expression of agency,
but youth-adult partnerships are desirable in
all aspects of a program (Zeldin, McDaniel,
Topitzes, & Calvert, 2000). Youth who have
voice, power, and adult support also have a
stronger sense of community (Evans, 2007).
A sense of agency is central to civic engagement.
Only people who feel that their actions
can make a difference are motivated to participate
in civil society. Some of the same kinds
of experiences that foster a sense of social purpose
also encourage youth to see themselves
as capable of taking effective action in their
community, their nation, and the larger world.
The kinds of experiences studied by Youniss
and Yates (1999) not only promote a sense of
purpose extending to others but also a belief in
one's capacity to act on behalf of others, and
to participate in the political process (see also
Larson & Hanson. 2005; Reinders & Youniss,
2005,2006; and Watts & Flanagan, 2007).
Human Capital
In contemporary Societies, education is the
most important producer of human capital
(Becker, 1993), the knowledge and skills that
enable a person to make a living. As large-scale
industrial production methods have displaced
traditional agriculture and crafts, so formal
education in schools has replaced the informal
transfer, often from parent to child, that characterizes
human capital formation in simpler
societies. Human capital is acquired throughout
a lifetime and from multiple sources. Both
the quantity and type of human capital vary
among children of the same age.
During the transition to adulthood, peers
begin to diverge widely in what and how
much they know and are able to do. Some set
themselves apart with advanced education and
training, enabling them to participate in the
professions and other rewarding economic
roles. Higher education is not the only institution
involved in this sorting process, but it is
the most important one in prosperous countries,
and its importance is growing in developing
countries. Access to education and training is
related to family income and education. Youth
in poverty face daunting barriers to accumulating
human capital because their schools, families,
and communities often cannot provide the
support they need to make use of education and
training opportunities (Hamilton & Hamilton,
2008; Schoeni & Ross. 2005).
Social Capital
Like human capital, the term social capital
makes an analogy between economic capitalsuch
as money, buildings, and machinerythat
enables the owner to engage in productive
Developmental Assets for Young Adults 499
moneymaking activities and human acquaintances
and connections that are beneficial to
their owner. Social capital inheres in direct and
indirect social relations that enable those who
possess them to achieve their goals.
Coleman (1990) spelled out the differences
among physical, human, and social capital:
Physical capital is wholly tangible, being embodied
in observable material form; human capital
is less tangible, being embodied in the skills and
knowledge acquired by an individual; social capital
is even less tangible, for it is embodied in the
relations among persons. Physical capital and
human capital facilitate productive activity,
and social capital does so as well. (p. 304)
One of the best illustrations of social capital
is the personal connections that enable a person
to find a job. A job seeker whose relatives
and acquaintances are unemployed or
employed only in low-level positions or one
without extensive social connections at all is
at a severe disadvantage in the labor market
compared to a job seeker with many acquaintances
and family members who are employed,
especially if they hold decision-making positions.
The prospects of finding a job are much
higher if people tell a job seeker about openings
and if acquaintances are in a position to
recommend the person to those who are hiring.
A well-established phenomenon in social
networking is "the strength of weak ties"
(Granovetter, 1973), meaning the importance
to finding employment and other purposes of
knowing people, even slightly, who are aware
of and can make accessible opportunities outside
one's own circles. The link between social
capital and employment is stronger than job
finding. A young person who would like to
become an engineer but whose family knows
no engineers may not learn until too late how
central mathematics is to engineering. He may
lack advice about which colleges have the best
engineering programs, what kinds of employers
hire engineers, and how to get a summer
internship that will help build a resume.
500 The Transition to Adulthood
Putnam (2000, pp. 22-24) distinguished
bridging social capital from bonding social
capital. Bonding social capital unites a group
and excludes outsiders, as in a lodge or sorority,
a tribe or small community. Bridging social
capital makes connections among people identified
with different groups. Young people who
seek to improve their station in life by gaining
enough education to earn a better living
than their parents and when they move away
from home to live and work in large cities
need bridging social capital. Bonding social
capital continues to be important, both with
their family and their community of origin. It
is also critical that they develop new groups
with which they share bonding social capital.
But social mobility by definition entails making
social connections with people in groups to
which one does not yet belong. That process is
multiplicative, One acquaintance from a new
social circle can introduce a person to many
more. Each of those new acquaintances, in
tum, may be able to open the door to another
social circle. Of course, social capital alone
is not sufficient; poor populations in South
Africa that are rich in social capital still find
themselves in poverty traps because they lack
access to financial capital (Adato, Carter, &
May,2006).
Mentoring is a special case of social capital;
it can serve both bonding and bridging
functions (Hamilton & Hamilton. 2008; see
also Rhodes & Lowe, this Handbook). A mentor
who is a neighbor or a family friend can
strengthen solidarity within a young person's
social circle of friends and neighbors. A mentor
provides bridging social capital when she
or he is betcer educated than most friends
and family and can introduce a young person
to new people and organizations, ideas and
opportunities. For example, such a mentor
might join parents in encouraging aspirations
for higher education but go beyond them by
offering specific information about financial
aid, taking a young person to visit campuses,
and writing a letter of recommendation that
carries added weight because of the mentor's
status. A mentor might provide bridging social
capital by arranging for a job interview with
an employer that is inaccessible to the young
person's friends and family members.
HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE
TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD
The royal road to adulthood leads through
higher education. The American residential
college epitomizes institutional support for the
transition to adulthood. (We use the term college,
in its uniquely American meaning, applying
to any institution of higher education from
a small 2-year or 4-year school to the undergraduate
component of a large university.)
Young people privileged to enroll in such institutions
are engaged in purposeful effort that
will enhance their ability to earn a living and
to take positions of influence and responsibility
in their communities. They are surrounded
by their peers, as is appropriate to their developmental
needs. Many of those relationships
are likely to continue over their lifetime,
repeatedly providing useful information and
opportunities. Residential college students
live away from the immediate supervision of
their parents, which is also appropriate to their
age and maturity level, but they are far from
independent; Mom and Dad pay the bills and
welcome them home whenever they choose to
return. In Kett's (1977, p. 29) term, they are
semidependent. The adults around them
are trained and accountable to enhance their
welfare, education, and planning for the future.
Not only faculty, but residence staff, tutors,
counselors, career advisors, registrars, even
cafeteria workers and security guards share in
these responsibilities. In addition to courses,
students have access to a vast array of informal
educational and recreational opportunities,
some adult-led (museums, varsity sports) and
some student-led (campus newspapers, Greek
letter societies, clubs). In addition, and not to
be slighted, they enjoy identification with a
respected social role: student.
Even in the United States, which pioneered
mass higher education, the college experience
described above applies only to a minority.
Nearly one-third of youth of college age cannot
think about enrolling because they have
failed to graduate from high school (Barton,
2005). About 7% of dropouts earn aGED
by the age of 24 (Laird, DeBell, Kienzl, &
Chapman, 2007). During the fall after high
school graduation, between 64% and 69% of
youth enroll in 2-year and 4-year colleges.
Fluctuation has been in this range for more
than a decade (The Condition of Education,
2000-2008, Indicator 24, Table 24-1). About
57% of all undergraduates in the fall of 2006
were in 4-year institutions and 43% in 2-year.
About 20% of 4-year students were enrolled
part time; 59% of 2-year students were part
time (calculations from data in Table 1,
Knapp, Kelly-Reid, Ginder, & Miller, 2008, p.
4). About 58% of students enrolled in 4-year
institutions earned a bachelor's degree within 6
years (Table 5, Knapp et aI., 2008, p. 10). Less
than one-third of the population has earned a
bachelor's degree by the age of 29; for Blacks
it is 19.5%, and for Hispanics, 11.6% (Digest
ofEducation Statistics, 2007, p. 22, Table 8).
Despite compensatory and remedial education
programs and financial aid, income remains
highly correlated with higher education. Of
1990 high school sophomores, only 7.4%
of those whose parents were in the lowest SES
quartile had obtained a bachelor's or master's
degree 10 years later (Digest of Education
Statistics 2007, p. 458, Table 3l3).
Higher education is doubtless the surest
route out of poverty. The existence of a wide
range ofinstitutions, including highly selective
ones whose high cost is balanced by generous
financial aid and less selective or unselective
ones, most having low costs, makes it possible
for almost anyone to aspire to graduate from
college. However, aspirations are too often
frustrated. Modest graduation rates, which
are lower for those entering the least selective
institutions, mean that going to college is not
at all the same thing as earning a degree. After
dramatic increases in the enrollment of women
and minority students in higher education
Higher Education and the Transition to Adulthood 501
and especially in the elite institutions, progress
has stalled (Karen, 2002). Social class is
highly associated with enrollment in the most
prestigious institutions (Bowen, Kurzweil, &
Tobin, 2005).
Several western European countries have
quietly surpassed the United States in the proportions
of the student-age population enrolled
in higher education. In 200I, the rate of entry
of U.S. youth into higher education institutions
preparing students for postgraduate education
and the professions was 42%, compared to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) average of 47%. The
U.S. rate for primarily vocational institutions
was 13% eompared to the OECD average of
15% (The Condition olEducation, 2000-2008,
Indicator 17).
European universities are generally less like
total institutions than American residential colleges
(Cook & Furstenberg. 2002). Faculty are
less accessible, and professional staff support
for students is much sparser. Nonacademic
activities and housing are much less institutionalized,
left more in the hands of students.
Commuting to university varies among countries
depending upon how dispersed universities
are and how restrictive majors are.
Countries with numerus clausus provisions
limiting enrollment in the most popular majors
(e.g., medicine) require students to relocate.
Postsecondary enrollment rates are growing
rapidly in many developing nations, especially
for women, but falling in others. South Asia,
the Middle East, and the Caribbean regions
have seen the most impressive growth. SubSaharan
Africa, formerly Soviet Asia, and
South America have seen declines (Lloyd,
2005, pp. 88-89). None will soon achieve the
levels in the United States, western Europe,
and other prosperous countries. Moreover,
poor countries cannot afford ideal institutions.
They struggle both to provide places for those
wishing to enroll and to provide an acceptable
quality of education for those who do.
Housing, advising, and extracurricular activities
are often simply beyond their capacity.
502 The Transition to Adulthood
Basic needs such as seats in lecture halls,
libraries, and Internet access may go unmet
(polgreen, 2007).
As daunting as these kinds of conditions
are. and as far as they are from providing the
support young people need to become productive
adults, there is a second kind of limitation
to their effectiveness at this function. In some
countries, after students manage to overcome
all of these barriers and earn their degrees, they
enter labor markets that simply cannot absorb
so many graduates. Colonial economies and
educational systems established universities as
pathways to civil service. Neoliberal economic
policies have severely constrained the size
of government in many countries, eliminating
the positions formerly awaiting graduates.
In the absence ofvibrant economies. those graduates
either remain unemployed or are underemployed,
working at jobs that do not require
or reward their educational attainments. Large
numbers of university graduates drive taxis, run
shops, or remain unemployed. Having delayed
adulthood to obtain a university degree, they are
unable to earn enough money to support a family
and therefore remain not-yet-adults (Assaad,
1997: Siphambe, 2000: Sj()holm, 2005).
No doubt the continuous improvement of
institutions of higher education and the continuous
increase in the proportion of the population
with postsecondary education are goals
to be pursued everywhere. But the proportions
graduating in the United States, including those
whose college experience fails to approximate
the ideal represented by residential colleges
make clear that even Herculean efforts will not
succeed in enrolling the majority of youth in
most countries. And the reality of imbalances
between educational attainment and labor
market demand prove that a purely "supply
side"' approach does not work. Only if growing
demand f()r employees with higher education
matches the growing supply of graduates
can higher education improve life prospects.
Education certainly has noneconomic benefits,
but those benefits seldom satisfy either
the graduates who are unemployed or the
taxpayers who underwrote the expenses of
their education.
The same shift in employment that heightens
the value of higher education reduces
the employment prospects and earnings of
those without higher education. For too many
young people, the conclusion of their full-time
schooling leads to extended unemployment
and underemployment because they do not
have the knowledge and skills that are needed
in the labor market. This phenomenon can be
seen clearly in the United States, where the
real earnings of young men without education
beyond high school have declined drastically
over the past 3 decades. The automation and
offshoring of manufacturing have reshaped the
labor market to favor information and communication
over manual tasks, thereby privileging
more educated workers and women, increasing
the difference in earnings between those with
college degrees and those without.
College students and graduates may enjoy
a prolonged transition to adulthood as an
extension of the psychosocial moratorium
that Erikson (1963) described in adolescence.
Young people in this situation may tryout relationships,
lifestyles. and occupations while
consolidating their identities independent of
their families (Arnett, 2004). an opportunity
for further development. But when young
people are unable to assume adult roles and
responsibilities because of poverty and lack of
education, their transition might better be seen
as blocked than prolonged. The time between
the attainment of physical adulthood and ability
to act as adults does not necessarily increase
their human capital and other assets and may
become a trap from which they never emerge.
PROMISING INSTITUTIONS
If higher education is inadequate to the task or
enabling poor young people to acquire these
essential assets, then new or adapted institutions
are needed to support the transition of
low-income youth to adulthood. We describe
four, focusing on the opportunities they afford
young people to build a sense of purpose and
agency, human capital, and social capital.
Then we inductively identify some of the key
"features" of these institutions, using the term
in the same way as the Eccles and Gootman
(2002) panel did as the sources of asset building
for youth in communities.
The first institution, German apprenticeship,
is the most highly developed. Indeed,
we consider it also an excellent example of
a system, compared to the other three, which
are programs. Next, we describe YouthBuild,
which has some parallels to apprenticeship,
but is aimed at dropouts in American cities and
uses local housing construction and rehabilitation
as a focus for asset building. Our search
for institutions supporting the transition to
adulthood in developing countries was disappointing,
but we found two in Nairobi, Kenya.
One, Tap and Reposition Youth (TRY), adapts
microfinance to young women who have
migrated from rural villages and are highly
vulnerable to sexual exploitation and HIV
infection. The Community Cleaning Service
was created by young men in partnership
with a community-based organization and a
multinational corporation that meets a community
need while creating jobs and fostering
entrepreneurship.
The purpose of this exploration is to begin
to create a strategy to remedy the structural lag
that has left current institutions inadequate to
aid the transition to adulthood of poor youth,
in the United States and around the world.
Although the empirical evidence of their
success is far from comprehensive, the four
institutions described below appear to offer
opportunities for asset building. By identifying
the features they 'have in common we can see
more clearly how new and adapted institutions
for this purpose might be designed.
German ApprenticeshipI
Just as the residential college exemplifies an
institution designed to support the transition to
adulthood, German apprenticeship is an exemplary
institution for young people who do not
benefit from higher education. Part of what
Promising Institutions 503
makes it exemplary is that it is an alternative
that leads to desirable careers, but does not
rule out the more prestigious option; 5.4% of
young people who complete an apprenticeship
go on to higher education (Bundesinstitut filr
Berufsbildung, 2008).
As the rise of factories greatly diminished
the importance of apprenticeship in most
other industrializing countries, Germany
adapted the traditional practice by creating
new apprenticeable occupations and combining
them with schooling as the "dual system."
Similar systems evolved in Switzerland and
Denmark. Currently, after 10 years or more
of full-time school, young men and young
women enter apprenticeship contracts with
employers to learn one of some 350 recognized
occupations, including not only crafts
but technical and white-collar occupations as
well. Occupations regarded as feminine, such
as sales clerk and beautician are apprenticeable.
Agreements among employers, unions,
and government specify the knowledge and
skills to be learned in the workplace and in
a specialized vocational high school, usually
attended one day per week. After a term of 3
years (with some variation), apprentices must
pass written and performance tests to be certified
as skilled workers in their occupation.
Certification is required for employment in
apprenticeable occupations. The examinations
also test the employers' ability to deliver highquality
training. If too many of its apprentices
fail the examinations, the firm will lose its
right to train, which is considered a generalized
validation of its commitment to quality, a
very important issue in Germany.
The quality of apprentices' experiences
varies widely. In general, large firms invest
heavily in training their apprentices because
they expect to hire them as lifelong employees
and they rely upon highly skilled workers
to maintain quality standards. In such firms,
apprentices are selected from among vast numbers
of applicants and would most likely enroll
in selective second-tier colleges if they were in
the United States. At the opposite end of the
504 The Transition to Adulthood
spectrum, local bakeries and barber shops use
apprentices to do routine work at low wages
and seldom have sufficient demand for new
workers to hire them after their training is complete.
Young people who serve apprenticeships
but are unable to find employment in their
trade are disadvantaged compared to those
who are hired as skilled workers by their training
employer, but they are far better off than
their peers who have no training. Employers
in fields without apprenticeships prefer applicants
who have been trained in other fields.
Apprenticeship has social as well as technical
functions. It embeds young people in a
world of adults and adult roles and responsibilities
at a time when they are beginning
the transition to adulthood, enabling them to
observe adults other than parents and teachers
and to tryout adult roles. It provides appropriate
support by requiring responsibility and performance
but recognizing apprentices' need to
learn. Apprentices are paid for the work they
perform, but their wage levels are low, reflecting
their primary commitment to learning and
their employers' investment in their training.
Adults in the workplace have an explicit
responsibility to help them learn. In a small
firm, this responsibility rests with the owner
or shop supervisor, who must, by law, have
been trained as an apprentice and have had the
additional training and passed the higher level
examination to qualify as a master, an achievement
that carries high status in German society
and that is critical to the economy. In practice,
the master usually delegates responsibility for
training apprentices to one or more skilled
workers. Large firms may have full-time trainers
who supervise apprentices. The apprentices
rotate among various departments with different
immediate supervisors in each. Because all
skilled workers have themselves been apprentices
and because the training of apprentices is
widely recognized as an important function,
most adults readily help out as supervisors or
"just-in-time" instructors.
The role of apprentice is respected and
valued in Germany. The concept of vocation
(Beruj) is extremely important in Germany as
a part of a person's identity and apprentices
share in the identity of the vocation for which
they are preparing. A newspaper article that
names a young person, perhaps as a member
of a victorious soccer team, will state the occupation
in which she or he is an apprentice as an
essential piece of information. In some of the
traditional crafts, successful apprentices are
welcomed into the guild with a ceremony and
a mark of belonging, such as an earring or the
right to perform a folk dance.
Being surrounded most days by adults in the
workplace rather than peers in schooL apprentices
have ample opportunity to observe and get
to know adults outside their families at the time
when they are beginning to think of themselves
as adults. Earning their own money gives them
a measure of autonomy from their parents, but
most still Jive at home. Apprentices attend their
part-time vocational school with other apprentices
in the same occupation, not with their previous
schoolmates, so their peer networks grow
along with their connections to adults.
Current Challenges to the System
Over the past two decades the German economy
has been challenged by international
competition, which, in addition to its other
etfects, has raised questions about whether
the investment that apprenticeship requires
is repaid. Lexus and Acura have cut into the
market for Mercedes-Benz and BMW automobiles,
and Japanese workers are not trained as
apprentices.
Although the proportion of youth who
serve apprenticeships has declined over the
past 2 decades, some of them have enrolled
in higher education instead. It helps to put the
current "crisis" in perspective by noting that
in the face of these and other challenges, in
2006 the proportion of young people of the
appropriate age who were apprentices was just
under 60% (Bundesinstitut fur Berufsbildung,
2008). It would appear that reports of the death
of German apprenticeship have been highly
exaggerated.
Exacerbating the challenges of global competition,
the reunification of East and West
Germany beginning in 1990 caused economic
and institutional upheaval that continues
today, (For an excellent treatment of this transformation
as a natural experiment testing the
influence of social structural changes on life
courses, see Diewald, Goedicke, & Mayer,
2006.) Under the smothering protection of
communism, East German industry was a
powerhouse of the Eastern bloc, but the fall
of the wall revealed how hopelessly outdated
it was. The Trabant epitomized the shoddy
but also scarce products of the East German
system, which was as careless of its workers
as it was of its customers. Apprenticeships in
the construction trades and agriculture were
judged to be adequate; in fact, skilled construction
workers readily found employment in the
west. But in manufacturing, white-collar, and
technical occupations, both the workers who
had completed training and the training system
were often found to be unsuited to a market
economy. As West German firms bought up
East German enterprises, they often declined
to train apprentices, arguing that it was too
expensive under the circumstances and that,
besides, they had to give higher priority to
retraining adult workers.
Integrating Youth With Immigration
Backgrounds
Youth with immigration backgrounds are
another challenge to the system. This terminology
is used to include not only young
people who were born outside Germany, but
the children and grandchildren of immigrants.
Poorer school performance, limited language
skills, cont1icting cultural traditions, and discrimination
impede such young people's participation
in apprenticeship. As a result, youth
with immigration backgrounds experience
greater ditlicuJty in finding an apprenticeship
after they finish school than their classmates
with German ancestry. Among applicants for
apprenticeships in the spring of 2006, only
42% with immigration backgrounds were
Promising Institutions 505
successful by the fall compared to 54.1 % of
applicants without immigration backgrounds
who succeeded (Granato et ai., n.d., p. 2).
Applicants for apprenticeships whose
school records are inferior are understandably
less desirable to employers, but in a system
that relies upon the willingness of small business
owners and their employees to take young
people into a close personal relationship, as
well as a formal employer-employee relationship,
cultural difference (gender difference
as well) can be a potent barrier. Both higher
level school certificates and better grades help
native German applicants for apprenticeship
more than they help applicants with immigration
backgrounds (C'.Jfanato et ai, n.d., pp. 3-4).
The consequences of these differences carry
over into early adulthood, when only 15% of
young men between the ages of 25 and 35 with
German ancestry lack a formal occupational
certificate compared to 41 % of immigrants and
fully 57% of Turks (Granato et aI., p. 5). These
discrepancies are disturbing enough but they
have actually worsened over the past decade,
demonstrating clearly that more effective measures
are desperately needed.
At this point, the main alternative to
apprenticeship is vocational schooling, and
youth with immigration backgrounds are more
likely than those without to enroll in full-time
postcompulsory vocational schools (Granato
et aI., p. 2). Unfortunately, the schools they are
most likely to enroll in do not provide occupational
certification and are, therefore, far less
desirable and less useful in the labor market.
Transitional programs (e.g.. the vocational
preparation year) designed to help school leavers
move into apprenticeship are widely decried
as mere parking lots that occupy young people
but leave them no better off. They, too, are
disproportionately used by youth with immigration
backgrounds. New initiatives are envisioned
to address some ofthese issues (Kremer,
2007). An intriguing aspect of these etforts is
the attempt to convince employers that "intercultural
competence" is a desirable quality of
apprentices, one that gives an advantage to
506 The Transition to Adulthood
applicants who speak another language and are
not of German ancestry.
The institutional framework for apprenticeship
is a deep and multifaceted partnership
among employers, employees, and the education
system, each taking responsibility for part
of the education and training of apprentices
in collaboration with the others. These three
partners jointly determine specifications of
learning objectives, school-based curricula,
work-based training experiences, and examinations
to certify apprentices as skilled workers
in their occupation. Schools are represented
by the education ministries of the various
states (liinder). Employers are represented by
chambers (Kammern), organizations that can
sound like the Chamber of Commerce in the
United States, but are not voluntary; employers
in each field are required to belong to their
respective chamber. Employees are represented
in the system by their unions. The combination
of strong employers' organizations
and strong unions working with each other and
with government agencies has been a hallmark
of the German economy since reconstruction
following World War II, when they manifested
a strong collective ethos of working together
to rebuild the country.
Apprenticeship in the Eastl
Some of the most interesting current innovations
are occurring in the former Eastern states,
where apprenticeship, like everything else, was
dominated by the government and the "social
partnership" among employers, unions, and
schools was underdeveloped. Faced with lower
levels of economic activity and a scarcity of
large firms, which in the West provide many
of the best apprenticeships, people in the East
have tried new approaches. One of the boldest
innovations is the sponsorship of apprenticeships
by Bildungstriiger (Berger & Grunert,
2007) rather than firms. The term translates
literally as training carrier or provider but
might be better understood in U.S. terms as
intermediary organization. A Bildungstriiger
might be a community-based organization, a
church, even a city government that formally
assumes responsibility for the training of a set
of apprentices in a specific occupation. This
represents a dramatic break with traditional
practice. The presumption that employers are
best able to train is very strong, and the system
relies in large part on the expectation that training
firms will hire most of the apprentices they
train. But the involvement of Bildungstrager
has several advantages.
They sometimes create training workshops,
comparable to vocational school shops, in
which training begins and advanced techniques
are taught to apprentices who are protected
from the stresses of production. Many
large firms have such workshops, but they are
not feasible for small firms. Bildungstriiger
may also perform a brokering function, enlisting
multiple small firms in the training of the
same apprentices. Instead of remaining in one
firm for the duration of training, as is traditional,
apprentices in this arrangement rotate
among different firms, learning in each skills
not found in the others. In this way, small firms
that are unqualified to train apprentices may
participate in and contribute to apprenticeship
in collaboration with other firms, facilitated by
a Bildungstrager. (This alTangement has precedents
in the West but has been expanded and
elaborated in the East.)
The greatest drawback to relying on third
parties to train apprentices is identical to the
reason they are needed: Too few jobs are available.
Trained apprentices, as a result, cannot
expect their training firm to offer them a job;
they must take their hard-earned
into an unfriendly labor market.
Purpose and Agency
The need to select and qualify for an apprenticeship
demands from German youth an
early serious commitment to an occupation.
Although this is not an unalloyed good, it does
constitute a purpose that may be lacking in
young people in the United States at the same
age who have also concluded that they are not
college material. The distance and vagueness
of adult occupations for most American youth
in that situation deprive them of that sense of
direction.
Being treated as almost adult at work and,
when successful, beginning an adult career
with a well-paid job around the age of 20 can
add to young people's sense of agency. They
no longer need to rely on their parents economically.
They belong in the respected social
category of skilled worker in a recognized
occupation.
The impact of apprenticeship on civic attitudes
and behaviors is a controversial topic
in German sociology (Hamilton & Lempert.
1997). The controversy illuminates some large
differences between Germany and the United
States. On the one hand, observers from the
political right have expressed concern that
labor union involvement in apprenticeship
builds in a socialist bias that recruits impressionable
youth to the Social Democratic Party
and encourages an adversarial attitude toward
employers. The contrary perspective is that
giving employers so much inf1uence over the
education of so many youth leads to indoctrination
in pro-capitalist, pro-business ideology.
However, the consensus of multiple studies
is that apprenticeship does not have a strong
impact on political orientation or action in
one direction or the other. This is reassuring
if the concern is with indoctrination but cause
for concern if one presumes that youth should
be a time of political learning and socialization
and that apprenticeship and associated institutions
(e.g., apprentice representation on the
union-based works councils that participate in
the management of many German firms) should
have a salutary effect on apprentice citizens.
It may be that the new opportunities for collectiveconsciousness
and action arecounterbalanced
by the clear power imbalances between
employers and employees, even in Germany
where unions are strong and codetermination
remains a widely shared ideal. The old slogan,
"Lehrzeit ist keine Herrzeit" (apprentice
time is no time for being in charge), still holds.
Making greater use of apprenticeship as an
Promising Institutions 507
arena for developing civic competence would
require the creation of new opportunities and
a heightened awareness of the importance of
this aspect of youth development in Germany
(Hofer, 1999; Oswald, 1999).
Human Capital
Apprenticeship is primarily an institution
designed to build human capital. It is supported
by firms because it helps them meet
their need for highly skilled employees. Young
people choose to participate for the opportunity
it affords to gain human capital that provides
direct returns in the form of earnings, job
security, and prospects for continued learning
and higher level employment in the future.
Social Capital
Being colocated in workplaces as well as
schools, German apprenticeship can create
social capital for young people in the form
of new relationships with fellow apprentices
and with adult workmates, notably with the
skilled workers who are assigned to teach them.
Workplaces are adult centered, in contrast with
schools, giving apprentices opportunities to
observe and develop relationships with adults
outside their family. In addition to working
alongside adults, apprentices share break periods
and lunchtime with them.
YouthBuild
YouthBuild is an American program for lowincome
urban youth that engages them in
building and rehabilitating housing in their
communities. Currently about 8.000 youth, ages
16-24, are enrolled in 226 local YouthBuild
programs. Each year, YouthBuild tums away
14,000 applicants because funding is inadequate
to meet the demand (Dorothy Stoneman,
interview, August 31, 2007). Between 2002
and 2006: 90% of the youth enrolled had not
graduated from high school or earned aGED;
36% had been adjudicated. and 14% convicted
of a felony; 26% were on public assistance;
25% were parents; and the average age was
19.1, with a grade 7.2 average reading level
upon entrance; the average length of stay was
508 The Transition to Adulthood
8 months (YouthBuild USA Demographics
and Outcomes, 2002-2006, n.d.). In a survey
of graduates, respondents indicated that they
had faced on average four of seven categories
of challenges prior to entering YouthBuild: job
challenges, substance abuse. criminal justice.
home problems, care responsibilities, education,
and mental health (Hahn, Leavitt, Horvat, &
Davis, 2004, pp. 19-20). The extraordinary
impact of the program becomes clear when
considering Cohen and Piquero's (in press) estimate
of the "present value of saving a high-risk
youth ... to be $2.6 to $5.3 million at age 18."
YouthBuild began as a single program
in Harlem in 1978. "Since 1994, more than
76,000 YouthBuild students have helped
rebuild their communities, transformed their
lives, and created more than 17,000 units of
affordable housing in 226 ofAmerica's poorest
communities" (National Alumni Council, &
Young Leaders Council of the YouthBuild
USA Affiliated Network, 2008, p. i). Most
local programs are supported through competitive
federal grants from the U.S. Department
of Labor YouthBuild Program (p. i).
Components of the program include, in
addition to job training and a preapprenticeship
in construction skills, an alternative
school to help youth earn their GED or
high school diploma; engagement in community
service; leadership development;
building a mutually supportive mini-community
of adults and peers; and construction
and rehabilitation of housing in their
neighborhood (YouthBuild USA. 1996, pp.
1-2). After some time in the program, many
participants describe experiencing a kind of
epiphany. a turning point that gives them a
sense of purpose and agency. Handbooks and
manuals provide curricula on multiple topics
revealing the ambitious goals of the program:
blueprint for democracy, money skills, career
development, expanding opportunities in
trade unions, construction training, counseling.
education, planning housing and community
projects, tools and technology, teamwork
and leadership, construction-related math and
measurement, health and safety, and leadership
development.
An underlying premise of YouthBuild is
that staff foster the personal transformation of
participants. John Bell, the vice president for
leadership development and the Academy
for Transformation. wrote:
In our heart of hearts. what we most want
for the young people we work with is to provide
the environment for them to reach their highest
aspirations. When we look back at our own
transformations. for most of us there was at least
one caring, skillful adult who hung in there with
us over a period of time, on whom we relied for
some combination of encouragement. challenge,
information. guidance, teaching, validation, and
love; who believed in us until we believed in
ourselves (Bell, 2003. p. 1).
Leadership development is explicitly linked
to personal transformation.
A large part of what makes the Youthbuild program
effective is the attitude. communicated
immediately by the staff to the young people
as they enter the program. that they are potential
leaders and role models whose contribution
to the program and the community can and will
make a difference. This attitude is often so different
from the way disadvantaged young people
believe adults view them. that it provides
the opportunity and motivation for the young
people to rise to the challenge of transforming
their own lives, rebuilding their communities,
and taking responsibility for the future of
their communities. (YouthBuild USA, n.d"
pp ix-x),
Membership on committees provides
opportunities for youth to set policy and to
participate in community advocacy and action
(pp. 4-5). Leadership competency workshops
develop skills. Opportunities also include
accompanying staff to visit local government
offices and foundations (p. 6).
Testimonials by graduates from YouthBuild
provide heartrending detail about families
living in crowded apartments, parents' drug
addiction, pressure to join gangs involved in
violent behaviors, caring for younger siblings,
rotating foster care, dropping out of high
school or being expelled, gunshot deaths of
family members and friends, and being jailed.
I eventually became tired of the life I was leading.
After twenty one years I wanted a change.
Making rhis change was hard because it meant
shifting learned behaviors I had practiced since
I was a child. Then one day, I saw an advertisement
in the Employment News about the
YouthBuild program. Since then. my perspective
on life has changed dramatically. I took
advantage of all that YouthBuild had to offer.
1 attained my GED and received intense training
in constmction. I became employable, and
secured work with the Carpenters Union for
3 years. I made the change. From 1997 to now,
I've accomplished many goals I never thought
I'd reach. I am now the Program Manager of my
local YouthBuild. I am happily married and the
father of four beautiful children. I am a minister
at ... [my church] and was elected to serve as
the Vice President of YouthBuild USA's National
Alumni Council. In 2000, I started a city-wide
outreachlmentoring program for young men in
my community. Recently in 2005, I successfully
launched my own construction business
rhat employs local YouthBuild graduates and
students. I have made all of these changes and
I am still striving both locally and nationally.
(Graduate's letter to Dorothy Stoneman, personal
communication)
One youth described the YouthBuild boot
camp he attended during his first week. Passing
this Mental Toughness wilderness experience
dramatically served to separate him from the
temptations of the street and immersed him in
an environment ofpositive people who believed
he could gain a focus to succeed in life.
That was my first time like being away from
where I normally live.... When I got out there I
was happy just to be out of my environment. , ..
I can get used to this because nobody knows me
and I don't know nobody. I can make friends.
Positive people lead to positive things....
Promising Institutions 509
People who want to see you do good. People that
will help you if you need help and such things
like that, counsel you and all that. Everything is
in here for me to do. I am in the right place....
So now I can do what I need to do. (Hamilton &
Hamilton, 2008, p. 20)
Interviews of 57 graduates from eight sites
from the Hahn et al. study (2004), chosen
because they were "established, respected programs
with sound leadership that represented
the norm of a solid YouthBuild program as
well as the geographical and cultural diversity
of YouthBuild's national network" (p. 5) corroborate
the generality of these expressions of
purpose and agency. The youth both "envision
another life" for themselves in the future and
assert "a right to claim that better life" (p. 12).
Multiple youth describe the caring and support
they experienced in the YouthBuild program,
as filling a void and contributing to life
changes.
If I had the motivation and I had the support
like, "You can do this," I would have been out
of high school and gone to college... , But
I have slipped up, so now I am here; now they
are focusing, they getting me back on the right
track. ... I shot up [in test scores] 'cause I started
studying and I got focused with my work.... [A
staff member] sat me down and talked to me on
a one-on-one basis and told me, "You have a real
good potential and I don't want to see anything
happen to you in society, like when you become
a part of statistics by like getting locked up and
going through the whole system." (Hamilton &
Hamilton, 2008, p. 20)
A graduate program (YouthBuild USA,
1996, p. 117) creates additional opportunities
for graduates through continuing education,
job and career counseling, support services,
leadership development and social life. As
Hahn et at (2004, p. 26) report, "Close to half
of graduates cited lack of education, lack of
training, and lack of computer skills as affecting
them 'a lot' or 'some'; a clear indication
that many graduates have realized after being
510 The Transition to Adulthood
in the post-YouthBuild world for a while that
YouthBuild is the beginning but that the real
world often requires more."
Youth in the program keep journals to
reflect on their past lives and help them think
about future directions. Peers in the program
and staff suggest questions.
Like past experiences, like what has gone on
in our life that we want to change. Or things
that we look back on and I wish that they had
never happened because I would have been
doing this right now. And that's what I do. Like I
just reflect on the past. Like welI I did this but
I knew that I could have been doing this when I
was doing that. And that's probably what got me
sidetracked. But now that I am back into the program,
now I can really have time to focus on my
work. And to get prepared for the future because
life is short. You never [know] who's gonna
pass. You never know what's gonna happen. So
I got to work hard now and rest when I am dead.
(Interview conducted by M. A. Hamilton)
This youth attributed his positive direction
and focus in part to his relationship with a staff
person in YouthBuild.
I mean if I am having a problem, I need to talk
to him.... If YOll need a push, he is the one to
push you, "Go ahead and do it:' If you fall he's
picking you back LIP to try again. Like that, so
when I go to him there's nothing but positive
information that he gives me.... He was just
a good mentor. He shows me the ins and outs,
like this is what you not supposed to do and this
is what you can do. (Interview conducted by
M. A. Hamilton)
The words of another youth suggest how
a haven of stability and positive relationships
can change a youth's life path, creating an
intent to give back to the community.
My objective is to develop and deliver educational
presentations for at-risk youth and adults
working with at-risk youth. Conduct activities
that develop critical and strategic thinking for
youth empowerment. Expose youth to learning
experiences that increase their expectation
for a viable. stable future. Create an environment
that encourages, nurtures and contributes
to positive relationships of at-risk youth and
adults. Expose youth and young adults to the
possibilities of education, post secondary education
as well as career alternatives. Promote
activities that develop new learning skills and
advance traditional ones while engaging youth
in activities that provide team building, networking,
communication, and other soft people skills.
(Participant'S response to survey, provided by
Dorothy Stoneman)
Sense ofPurpose and Agency
The purpose of the program, illustrated above,
is to provide both opportunity and inspiration
for upward mobility among a highly disadvantaged
population, namely, very poor youth
who have dropped out of high school. Many
have also been involved in crime and drug use.
Mental health problems are common. A survey
of graduates found that 75% were enrolled
in higher education, receiving additional job
training, or employed in jobs paying an average
wage of $IO/hour; and 48% reported
being involved in their community. Reported
criminal activity and drug use was dramatically
lower than on entry to the program (Hahn
et aI., 2004, pp. 22-23).
Dorothy Stoneman, the founder, emphasizes
that a "crucial YouthBuild 'product' is
a network of ethical and inspired young leaders
who have been raised poor and understand
their communities' needs and can step forward
to take responsibility for the well-being
of these communities" (Hahn et aI., 2004,
p. 3). Stoneman refers to current alumni efforts
locally and nationally that provide training
opportunities and networking, while admitting
that many youth still are pressed to finish their
OED or work through other personal problems
that did not disappear during their year or less
in the program (p. 3). The graduate's letter
above indicates such an achievement, another
participant's survey response quoted above
states similar intentions.
Human Capital
The manifest purpose of YouthBuild is to
increase the human capital of youth who have
very little, in the form of construction skills
and a GED or high school diploma. However,
the program's goals and its structure reach
farther, raising aspirations and teaching leadership
skills, which are applicable to a wider
range of subsequent activities. The postgraduation
accomplishments of participants are very
impressive in contrast to their prospects upon
enrollment.
Social Capital
Participants' testimony conveys the significance
of a caring staff, people who, without
being formally designated mentors, establish
the climate for participants' personal transformation,
as expressed in the stories. The
program also builds a positive peer culture in
which young people who have experienced
some of the same disadvantages and missteps
work together toward common goals and
develop a sense of solidarity that gives them
self-confidence and a sense of self-worth
not experienced before by many when in the
company of non-related adults, especially
teachers, or of peers. The experience of these
relationships provides a foundation for future
achievement.
Community Cleaning Service
In Mathare, a slum of Nairobi, Kenya, a group
of young men in their late teens and early
twenties founded the Community Cleaning
Service (CCS) to clean bathrooms on contract
with apartment house residents, who share toilets
among multiple households. The young
men's enterprise makes it possible for them to
earn enough for daily subsistence while they
also learn how to create a sustainable business
that benefits the residents.
The Base of the Pyramid (BoP) refers to
the 4 billion people in the world who live in
poverty, on less than the equivalent of $2 a day.
Business strategists (Hart, 2005; Prahalad &
Hart, 2002) have pointed out that a business
Promising Institutions 511
can make a profIt by selling very expensive
products and services to the very wealthy but
very small number of people at the top of the
population pyramid or by selling very inexpensive
products and services to the very poor
but huge number of people at the base of the
pyramid. Examples include selling shampoo
sachets to people in India wishing to improve
their cleanliness and appearance but whose
week's earnings would not pay for a whole bottle,
and selling insecticide packets to help poor
Kenyans control insect-borne diseases.
But people at the BoP can be more than
customers whose purchases increase profits
for corporations. Muhammad Yunus (1999)
received the Nobel Prize for figuring out how
to use microfinance to draft members of the
BoP population in Bangladesh as entrepreneurs
in the capitalist system. Women stool
makers, his first borrowers, were able to purchase
bamboo and pay back their $27 loans
after building their businesses' profitability
and freeing themselves from the crushing burden
of debt they previously owed to vendors
of their raw materials. In 1983, Yunus founded
the Grameen bank to provide loans to the poorest
of the poor and to build support networks
that would help them make the best use oftheir
small capital funds (www.grameenfoundation.
org/who_we_are/gCand_grameen_bankl).
Lessons learned about how corporations
can work with BoP populations have been
incorporated into a newly revised protocol by
the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise
at Cornell University (Simanis & Hart, 2008).
The principles and cases explain how to use
a combination of business development and
community development strategies to identify
market niches and then co-create businesses
with the community that meet both the needs
of the community and the company. Using the
Community Cleaning Service as one example,
Simanis and Hart set out a "co-creation logic"
that so far has been partially tested in Kenya
and India.
In 2005, a team from Cornell's Johnson
School of Management, the University of
512 The Transition to Adulthood
Michigan and others, sponsored by the SC
Johnson Company, went to Kenya to identify
partners to try to implement the first version of
this BoP protocol (Simanis, Hart, Enk, Duke,
Gordon, & Lippert, 2005). In Kibera, Nairobi,
East Africa's largest slum, they came into contact
with youth groups collecting 'Trash for
Cash," known locally as "Taki ni Pato." These
youth groups were operating with the support
of several nonprofit nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), notably Carolina for Kibera,
which was founded by a student from the
University of North Carolina (http://cfk.unc.
edul) and Pamoja Trust, a local NGO. Justin
DeKoszmovszky. who participated in the three
month "immersion" as a Cornell MBA student
and is now employed by the SC Johnson
Company, explained in an interview (May 19,
2008) that the business idea during the first
year was for the youth to run a "bug killing"
company using SC Johnson insecticide products
in and around the homes of people who
could not afford to buy the products themselves.
But this business was not successful.
SC Johnson and the young entrepreneurs with
whom they were working needed to evolve the
initial "service concept."
And what we saw was one of the groups in
another slum actually, not in Kibera. but
in ~1athare, had started cleaning shared toilets.
Mathare is what we have come to call a "vertical
slum:' whereas Kibera is a "horizontal
slum." So if you can imagine. Kibera is almost
J00% single-storey, mostly mud walled, some
cement block, corrugated steel roofs. And it is
about the size of Central Park. with some estimates
of about I million people, maybe a little
less. living there. :\1athare. by contrast is mostly
4-6-storey buildings, cement blocks, with about
5-6 apartments per floor. There is usually one
toilet point and one shower point on each floor,
so it is shared across five or six households,
which could each have about five people within
them. So it is a serious amount of sharing going
on. And like any shared resource. unfortunately,
the toilets are not maintained or cared for in the
way that anyone would like them to be. So these
toilets in Mathare, in these vertical OUIIUlIlgS,:
had become really, really unhealthy, unsanitary,
unpleasant, to say the least. To the point
some people, some parents were not letting
children use toilets by themselves, for fear
they would touch a wall, slip and fall, or anything
like that and that could be a serious
hazard.
The entrepreneurs we had been working
in Mathare evolved a new business by
ing to the situation in their neighborhood.
was very different from the one in which we had
focused originally, and started doing this
same theory, the same idea, creatmg a servIce ID
a community based on an SC Johnson
that also really delivered a significant amount
benefit for the community at a price point
one could atTord, because it was shared
multiple people. But it was an idea that we
not had. Now we are really focused on
toilet cleaning. and developing that a, a
ness and growing that as a business.
offers the service. telling residents of each
"Everyone puts in about 30 cents and we
the toilet." There was no regular cleaning
and in most buildings there is no running
So it is an added value to the residents.
DeKoszmovszky, interview, May 19.2008)
Describing the changes that occurred
both the location of the project and the
ness plan, DeKoszmovszky explained how
and other outsiders had learned one of the key
principles in community organizing from the
local entrepreneurs they worked with.
One of the learnings we had in year one. as we
were going from.... having a business concept
to creating a business that is an on-going, oper- .
ating entity. we were talking a lot about "sweat
equity"-put in the time to develop the business,
and the income will come later on. What
we realized very quickly was at the Base of the
Pyramid, when you are working with very poor
partners. poor from an income standpoint, rhey
cannot make the investment of sweat equity.
That is too expensive. Most of these folks are day
laborers or have very diverse income streams;
even within one day they might do 2 or 3 jobs or
2 or 3 income-generating activities. Dedicating
half of a day to working with us to go door-todoor
and sell a service, if they did not make
3 or 4 sales a day, it affel:ted what they ate that
night very, very literally. And so sweat equity, not
a capital investment, even a time investment is not
something that at this level is nel:essarily even possible.
I think one of the myths about the Base of
the Pyramid or poor people in general and working
with them is that they have a lot of time. That's
not necessarily true. In one of the families there
is someone abroad who is sending money home
or someone else who's making money in the family
and therefore evelyone is relying on the one
income. But at least in my experience in Nairobi
with youth that has not been the case. They use the
term, "hustling." If you ask them, "How do you
make your money')" most of them will say, "I hustle."
That means that in the morning they might
be down at the local potato market. So they haul
3 saeks of potatocs before II am up to the store of
someone who's hired them to do that.
And then in the afternoon they're going to sell
newspapers to rush hour traffic. Or in the middle
of the day they might try to pil:k up some work.
Or now a lot of them are working with CCS,
cleaning toilets or selling services and making
some money that way. There is something of a
fallacy that there is this sweat equity component
that people can put in and that companies and
development agencies, all they have to do is put in
money and invest in the capital and the (workers')
time is available. I think that's one of the things
that 1 learned is not necessarily the case. (Justin
DeKoszmovszky, interview, May 19, 2008).
Creating a business requires identifying
and developing leadership. DeKoszmovszky
commented on this process, emphasizing that
business leadership calls for different qualities
than some informal youth leaders possess.
One of the things we had to do early on was to
get away from the existing hierarchy in the preestablished
youth groups, and having leadership
of the business not be based on where someone
was within the pel:king order in the youth group,
but rather how effective they were at selling the
Promising Institutions 513
business, doing the business, managing the business.
And that has been a key shift. Now we find
that some of people who are leaders of the business
today are not those who are leaders of youth
groups. They are often somewhat quieter, less
outgoing than the typical group leader, and they
are often somewhat on the outskirts of the youth
group. (Justin DeKoszmovszky, interview, May
19,2008).
The challenge of finding and building
human capital is enormous because oflow levels
of education in the population. According
to DeKoszmovszky, most youth participants
have no more than a primary school education
and even then it might be a minority who are
able to write (Interview, 2008).
What began as a partnership between
a company and a community organization
has evolved into an independent business.
Recently, the community-based nature of the
CCS business and its members' involvement
with and support from the community created
a new opportunity.
A newly-elected member of parliament contacted
one CCS group, one of the most successful and
longest running ones ill Mathare, and is offering
them [a contract to operate1a public toilet, which
is closer to the center of town, It could be a very
lucrative business. Because she (member ofparliament]
knows the work they do in the community,
and because she is confident that the income that is
generated by giving them the right to operate this
toilet will go back to community rather than an
outside business owner, she is willing to help them
get this business.... They clearly did some, not
formal lobbying, but they were very, very savvy
[about local politics]. Incredibly savvy. Clearly
they were in touch with her and or her office. and
let her know, "By the way, weare still out here...."
And it paid off for them. Now they have an
opportunity to do this potentially rather lucrative
other business. They are locally involved. (Justin
DeKoszmovszky, interview, May 19.2008).
Purpose and Agency
Survival is the primary purpose motivating the
young men in CCS. Their sense of agency is
514 The Transition to Adulthood
evident in the diligence and creativity they demonstrate
by finding a variety of different ways to
"hustle" a living. CCS adds some new dimensions.
First, it is another source of earnings for
people who are so poor that they need multiple
sources in case one disappears or a sudden need
overwhelms their earning capacity. Second, after
it is established, CCS provides a more regular
source of income. The work is steady and the
payment is contracted in advance. Third, and
most significant from the perspective of promoting
agency, at CCS the youth are not supplicants
asking store owners for work or salesmen
hawking newspapers to drivers stuck in traffic.
They are the ovmers and executives of the
company that they conceived and founded and
that they can modify if they ehoose. One indicator
that this new experience can change participants'
behavior is that several entrepreneurs
independently started new businesses, such as
juice stands and barber shops. In contrast to the
CCS entrepreneurs, Herbert (2008) describcd
the plight of urban underc1ass dropout youth
in the United States who "hustle" by turning to
illicit activity when they see no other options.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the
partnership that created CCS is the respect paid
by the representatives of an American corporation
and universities to the needs, preferences,
and wisdom of young men in an African slum.
At least as described, this behavior seems the
opposite of the historical colonizing approach
that deprives people of agency. It is admirable,
but seems to emerge not only from commitments
to dealing fairly with people but also
from the pragmatic realization that this is the
only way to create a viable and enduring business.
Whatever its origins, this experience of
being respected and wielding influence can be
an important source of agency.
Human Capital
The BoP protocol (Simanis & Hart, 2008) is not
onlyatemplatefordevelopingnewbusinessesbut
also a process through which people who never
imagined starting a business both contribute
their knowledge and skills and develop them
by co-creating a business with their partners.
Initially, the protocol calls for pre-field processes
of selecting the site, forming and preparing
a team and selecting local partners.
Phase I-"Opening Up" involves embedding
the company in the community to co-create
the business concept. Phase II-"Building the
Ecosystem"-involves building the business
prototype and shared commitment. Phase UI"Enterprise
Creation"--emphasizes the further
development of the business model, including
testing. and expansion (Simanis & Hart, 2008).
Throughout the process entrepreneurship on the
part of local participants is nurtured, leading to .
the creation of additional new businesses.
Social Capital
One advantage to the link between communitybased
organizations and a large multinational
corporation is that the resulting social capital-personal
connections-can help people
build their human capital. One of the leaders ofa
project that preceded CCS stood out for his
academic promise, though he had not graduated
from high school. With sponsorship from
team members and Carolina for Kibera, he
was admitted to Manchester University, where
he earned a master's degree in development.
It is not clear to what extent CCS gives participants
access to mentors. It seems that the
entrepreneurs who will lead a group are tied
to managers, and get a fair amount of direction
from them, particularly in terms of their own
personal short-range goals for the business.
When participants have learned to be entrepreneurs,
they are also able to become mentors for
other youth in the program.
Tap and Reposition Youth (TRy)3
Microfinance, described above in association
with the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh created
by Muhammad Yunus, typically works
with groups of poor women who are married
and have children (Emlkar et aI., 2006, p. II).
Their maturity, family commitments, and roots
in the community stabilize the groups and
account for high rates of repayment.
TRY was created in the slums of Nairobi,
Kenya, by two organizations, K-Rep Development
Agency and the Population Council.
K-Rep had extensive experience with microfinance
with adults as the largest and longestrunning
microfinance organization in Kenya,
Being concerned about reproductive health,
the Population Council identified young
women (ages 16-22) in the area as especially
vulnerable to HIV/AIDS infection and more
generally to sexual exploitation. As in many
other developing countries, Nairobi's slums
are the destination for young people emigrating
from rural villages. In patriarchal societies,
young women have few rights at best.
When they leave their families and their communities
to settle among strangers, they lose
whatever ~upport they once had. Adding to
their vulnerability, the "informal settlements"
where they live are so designated in part to
justify their exclusion from law enforcement
and other government services. In the midst
of population churning, even informal social
institutions and social networks have not yet
formed.
A few statistics convey the situation well.
Kenya has a well-developed primary education
system. Ninety percent of 12- to 13year-olds
are enrolled in school (Mensch,
Bruce, & Greene. 1998, cited by Erulkar
et aI., 2006, p. 7). But only 22% of 15- to
17-year-old girls in the slums of Nairobi are
in school. Fifty-eight percent of those girls
do not live with either parent (Erulkar et aI.,
p. 7). The HIV infection rate among 15- to
19-year-old girls living in Nairobi, measured in
2003. was 5.1 % (p. 8).
TRY was designed as a means of helping
poor young women who were not in school to
enhance their economic situations so that they
could better protect themselves from sexual
exploitation and the risk of HIV infection that
results. Erulkar et al. (2006) and coauthors
reported three phases of the program's development.
In the first phase, the model originally
designed for adults was used, Enthusiasm for
microfinance in Asia and Africa has led to
Promising Institutions 515
large-scale expansion of this model and to a
growing emphasis on self-sustaining institutions;
that is, on building institutions with rates
of repayment and capital formation adequate to
support their continuation and growth without
infusions of aid funds. As a consequence of
this understandable emphasis, microfinance
organizations have increasingly concentrated
solely on saving and lending, to the exclusion
of other functions.
Following this model, participants began
by attending a 6-day training program to learn
about business planning and management.
bookkeeping, and how to fill out and evaluate
a loan application. Trainers emphasized
that the program is about self-help, not aid.
Personal issues including sexual health and
relationships were also discussed. After the 25
or so members got to know one another and
the statT, they began to build up a loan pooi
with weekly contributions that were collected
and placed in a group savings account at a
local bank. Originally, each member put in the
equivalent of about 26 U.S. cents weekly. But
members decided to raise that number to 65
cents. After about 2 months of contributions.
when sufficient funds had accumulated, subgroups
of five participants met to select the
two with the strongest applications to receive
the first loans, averaging 147 U.S. dollars.
Repayment began the next week so that the
fund could be replenished for the next round
of loans. After all members received a loan the
first recipients became eligible for a second.
Loans were used mainly to start small businesses,
including a hairdressing salon, a used
clothing store, and a fruit juice business.
Participants voluntarily added a parallel
savings plan for nonbusiness purposes. Recognizing
their inability to cope with financial
emergencies or make nonessential purchases,
they created a "merry-go-round" in which each
member contributed a small amount weekly
that was given to one of the members in turn.
In this manner, each member eventually accumulated
a reserve amounting to nearly 4 U.S.
dollars. The weekly recipient of the fund often
516 The Transition to Adulthood
made the event into a party, which helped
build group solidarity. In addition to putting
the accumulated money away, some members
used it to purchase clothing or improve their
homes.
The creation of the merry-go-rounds
reflected not only the need for social support
to help members save, but the difficulty many
of them had in protecting savings from husbands
or boyfriends. The group and its savings
account offered a safe place to keep extra
money that a man might otherwise take and
use for his own purposes.
Repayment rates and participation were high
at first, but then began to fall off. The microfinance
design depends completely on the continuous
cycle of contributions and repayments
building up to be loaned out. When some loan
recipients default and when members withdraw,
the cycle is broken and it may not be
repairable. Some members who had repaid
their loans were denied second applications
because other members failed to repay theirs.
As members dropped out, they withdrew their
contributions, threatening to leave remaining
members with the responsibility for outstanding
loans that were not repaid by others.
Analysis of the emerging problems revealed
that the youngest and most vulnerable members
were experiencing the greatest difficulties,
leading to the conclusion that "the program's
social-performance objectives of increasing
girls' security and financial assets cont1icted
with its financial-performance objectives
focused on credit and loan repayment" (Erulkar
et aI., 2006, p. 26). This conflict was manifest
in the role of the credit officers who were
expected simultaneously to encourage and support
the members in all aspects of their lives
and to enforce repayment schedules. It interfered
with the formation of personal relationships
among members: One might make a new
friend over tea and cookies in the home of the
week's merry-go-round winner only to have to
pressure the new friend to keep up loan repayments
so that the account would have enough
money to make a loan when her turn came.
Responding to this analysis, K-Rep and the
Population Council created a new role for mentors
who would focus on members' personal
and social issues and leave financial management
to the credit officers. They recruited mentors
to address the issues that members had
struggled with: health, relationships, conflict
management, learning opportunities, and business
management. Meetings addressing these
topics were added to the weekly meetings on
saving and loans. This adaptation recognized
that young women reeently arrived from the
countryside who are mostly unmarried and
not yet mothers have small social networks
and are mobile. It is very common for them to
marry and then move away.
However, it did not recognize another need
that members had expressed. Living so close
to the edge of survival, they were always only
a few hundred shillings away from disaster.
They welcomed the encouragement and support
they received to save and invest in their
long-term economic benefit and to put aside
some extra money for purchases. But they also
needed savings for emergencies, and the only
way to gain access to the money they put into
the loan account was to quit the program. A
member faced with a medical bill or the need
to rent a new place to live had no way of getting
the money she needed except to withdraw
all of her contributions from the common
account. Concerns about these issues were
magnified when repayment and participation
began to drop and remaining members worried
that their contributions would be used to cover
other members' debts.
Recognition of this problem set the stage
for TRY phase 3 in which Young Savers Clubs
were created with many of the same young
women and many of the same procedures as
the original model. such as weekly meetings
to deposit savings in a joint account. The difference
was that deposits were not for loan but
personal savings, available at any time to the
depositors. Despite staff concerns that girls
would put all their money into savings and
stop contributing to the revolving loan fund,
and the
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the most common response was for young
women to participate in both.
Two of the key themes that emerged from
the TRY experience are the importance of the
social interaction it promotes and the different
needs and capacities of the pa.rticipants.
Under the anomic conditions facing the young
women targeted by TRY, simply having a
group of peers to meet with weekly and one
or more older women to talk to was a significant
improvement in their lives and would
have been regardless of the reasons for meeting.
Many of the additions to the program
acknowledged and responded to the need for
human contact, for friendship and caring.
But repeatedly the differences among participants,
especially by age, came to the surface.
Dropouts from the original program were
younger, had less education, were likely to live
with a parent, and were poorer compared to
those who persisted. Their most pressing financial
need was not for a business loan but for a
safe place to keep savings that could be readily
accessed in an emergency. Mixed groups
encountered problems when some women,
mostly older, were hoping to create a business
while others simply wanted to save money and
were anxious about whether they could regain
access to it or whether other members would
pay back their loans. Older participants were
readier to save and to repay loans. Like classic
beneficiaries of microfinance they wanted to
maintain their access to capital, taking out and
repaying a series of loans. Younger participants
gained the most simply from the discipline of
saving and of having to repay their loans. One
loan might be sufficient. They needed more
mentoring and social support. Their default
rate was higher. but their needs were too.
TRY was accompanied by a well-designed
evaluation (Erulkar & Chong, 2005). Participants
were matched with nonparticipants and
both groups were interviewed before the program
began. Small sample size and extreme
difficulty in locating nonparticipants for the
postintervention interview make evaluation
findings less robust than desired; because of
Promising Institutions 517
high residential mobility only 17% could be
located. But the amount of data collected on
participants, induding records on what they
did, and comparisons by age within the participant
group yielded valuable insights.
Reflecting the ambitious and diverse goals
of the program, financial outcomes were
assessed along with gender attitudes and
knowledge about reproductive health issues.
After the program, TRY participants compared
to matched nonparticipants reported higher
income, more household assets, and more
savings, which were also more secure. They
were more likely to endorse the principle that
women should be able to refuse sex with her
husband. And they were somewhat more likely
to say they could negotiate sexual relations,
including condom use. However, they did
not demonstrate greater knowledge of sexual
health issues.
One number captures both the limitation~
and the potential of the program. After 5 years
of operation, the repayment rate for loans had
fallen to 50%, far too low to sustain a revolving
loan fund. Yet if the nonfinancial benefits
are compared to those from many other social
and health programs, the fact that participants
put up part of the costs themselves makes it a
more reasonable investment. Most poignantly,
the young women who proved least able to
meet the requirements of microfinance were
also the most vulnerable.
With both the benefits and limitations
in mind, and recognizing the age differences in
participants' experience, Erulkar et al. (2006),
conduded by recommending a differentiated
and staged approach. TRY demonstrates that
the standard approach to microfinance that has
demonstrated its value and efficacy with older
women in established communities is simply
not suitable to the target group in the Nairobi
slums, especially those still in their teens. They
require far more social support and mentoring
and they are far less able to generate value
with their loans. For this group, savers clubs
and opportunities for social interaction and
learning, links to youth-serving organizations,
518 The Transition to Adulthood
training programs, and other supports could
magnify the effectiveness of these program
elements. Strictly organized microfinance,
in this scenario, would be reserved for more
mature and confident young women, some of
whom would make the transition from the
previous stage. Additional means of learning
about employment and business would also
be made available to the more mature group,
including vocational training, work experience,
apprenticeships, and other forms of on-the-job
training.
Purpose and Agency
Just like the young men creating the Community
Cleaning Service, the young women who
are their peers and neighbors are motivated by
what Maslow (1954) identifIed as the fundamental
human need, survival. Most of them
relocated to the vicinity of Nairobi in search
of a better life than they eould make for themselves
in their home villages. Arriving in a
strange place without family and friends, they
need guidance and support to find the most
rewarding possibilities for earning a living.
Grasping these possibilities requires and builds
a sense of agency.
It is difficult to imagine a more shattering
absence of agency than the experience
reported by several TRY participants of having
exchanged sex for subsistence. Among the
85% of participants who reported being sexually
experienced when they began the program.
only 37% said they had willingly consented to
their sexual initiation (Erulkar et aI., 2006, pp.
26-27). Confronted with the power imbalances
that underlie such exploitation, the threats to
physical health posed by HIV infection cannot
be resisted solely with education. Young
women need to know that they have the support
they need to provide for themselves and
that they can resist unwanted sexual advances.
Although the evaluation did not assess
agency or purpose, the reports of participants
succeeding in building small businesses suggest
that some of them gained the ability to
plan and to carry out their plans.
Human Capital
TRY focuses on accumulating financial capital
but simultaneously on building the attitudes
and habits of saving and investing wisely.
Training in business practices, the modeling
by peers of successful entrepreneurship, and
the experience of making business plans and
decisions individually and as part of a group
also add to participants' human capital.
Social Capital
As significant and relevant as purpose and
agency and human capital are in TRY, it epitomizes
the power of social capital. Microfinance
relies upon the power of personal relationships
and the trust that develops within them. TRY
recruits young women who have left most of
their social capital back in their home villages
and helps them build a new fund of social capital.
This is where TRY departs from classical
microfinance, which builds on existing social
capital of long standing. The obvious explanation
for the much lower repayment rates in
TRY and for the need to build in additional
supports is that TRY participants are defined
by the very absence of the social capital that
made microfinance work so well among
mature women in Bangladeshi villages.
Participating in a saving and lending group
adds to young women's social capital, but
the experience of TRY demonstrates that the
group itself and its activities are insufficient.
Especially for teenagers. the chance to make
friends with peers and to share purely social
time are essential. Adults who can serve as
mentors are another important form of social
capital, greatly augmented by the addition of
older women to the program staff who were
formally designated as mentors and selected to
meet needs expressed by the participants.
FEATURES OF ASSET-BUILDING
INSTITUTIONS
The four institutions described above seem to
promote asset building. They differ in many
ways, butthey alsosharesomecommonfeatures,
meaning the ways they are structured and the
kinds of experiences that participants have.
We find six common features: public/private
partnerships; learning and earning; responsible
social roles; youth leadership and civic engagement;
proliferating pathways; and mentoring.
The four institutions also illustrate the difference
between systems and programs.
The term institution has multiple, broad
meanings. We introduce here another such
term, system, and contrast it with program. In
this context, we mean by system an entity that
is large enough to accommodate nearly all of
those who can benefit from it. For example,
school systems are expected to find a place for
every child of the appropriate age. A system
endures; its existence is notdependenton annual
fund raising or a variable legislative appropriation.
A system also has clear and robust
connections to other systems (Hamilton &
Hamilton. 1999).
German apprenticeship exemplifies systems.
Despite current struggles to find adequate
placements. it continues to serve more
than half of the eligible age cohort. Its t1nancial
support is solid enough to carry it through
some employers' decisions to opt out. And it
very clearly and strongly links the country's
education system with the Jabor market. It also
provides paths to other parts of the educational
system, including a range of postsecondary
vocational institutions and even universities.
Our other three institutions are programs.
not systems. We present them as potential
seeds for new systems. but acknowledge that
they remain small and vulnerable. YouthBuild
is both the oldest and the largest. The success
of YouthBuild's leaders in gaining federal
funds and private donations bodes well for
continued growth. Ideally, that growth will be
in the direction of becoming a widely valued
and recognized institution to meet the needs
of young people who have failed in and been
failed by schools. It is encouraging in this context
that the educational component is being
enhanced and formalized. The participants
who wrote and signed their Declaration oj
Features of Asset-Building Institutions 519
Inter-Dependence demonstrated an awareness
of the need for stronger systems by pointing
out that YouthBuild alone cannot achieve all of
its goals. Better schools and better jobs are
also needed.
Progress toward system status is harder to
envision for CCS and TRY. Both are small
scale. We have not been able to determine
how they fared during and after the political
and ethnic violence that reccntly swept parts
of Kenya. However. they illustrate some of the
possibilities and demonstrate that even under
the most challenging conditions creative and
committed people can find solutions.
Expanding on the theme of system building,
we also urge attention to the ecology of
institutions in which thesc programs---possibly
nascent systems-function. Bronfenbrenner's
(1979) ecological conception of the world in
which people develop included four nested
levels of systems, including the mesosystem,
which he defined as a system of systems.
Institutions supporting the transition to adulthood
are part of a mesosystem that includes
other institutions. Bronfenbrenner propounded
a series of hypotheses regarding the optimal
nature of mesosystems for development.
emphasizing links among microsystems and
reinforcement of positive int1uences in multiple
settings (pp. 214-218). In Bronfenbrenner's
terms. the YouthBuild staff member mentoring
a participant would be a microsystem.
To the extent that the staff member links the
YouthBuild participant quoted above to new
educational opportunities (additional microsystems),
he is helping him build links within
the mesosystem he inhabits.
PublicfPrivate Partnerships
When we searched for programs that might
foreshadow what new institutions supporting
the transition to adulthood could do and what
they would look like. we did not have in mind
as a criterion the melding that we found of
public with private. Although it is most highly
developed in German apprenticeship. the only
520 The Transition to Adulthood
system we examined as an alternative and
complement to higher education, the same
melding also characterizes the other three institutions.
Private organizations and entrepreneurship
are increasingly seen as more effective and
more cost-efficient than government programs.
The term socialentrepreneurship (Bomstein,
2(07) illustrates this convergence of sectors.
Whereas philanthropy and social service were
once seen as quite distinct, despite the examples
of people like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew
Carnegie, taking action to improve the lives of
others is now seen as requiring some ofthe same
competencies and same approaches a<; creating
a business. As Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and
less celebrated business moguls have turned
their attention to and invested their wealth in
social causes, they have brought to these kinds
of activities the same creativity, analytical powers,
and careful attention to costs and benefits
that made them wealthy and applied them in
the nonprofit arena. Muhammad Yunus and
others with a social mission have freely adapted
business methods.
Learning and Earning: Combining
Education with Employment
In the United States, working one's way
through school is a time-honored tradition. As
enrollment in higher education has exploded
and commuter institutions have proliferated,
working while going to college has become
normative, even in elite institutions. This practice
reflects not only the adaptation of institutions
of higher education to students who are
employed, part time or even full time, but also
a labor market that makes numerous part-time
and "swing-shift" jobs available. It is harder for
students in Germany and many other countries
to work part time because higher education is
organized for full-time students and the labor
market is organized for full-time workers.
The cost of attending school is not limited to
tuition charges. Enrolling in school also incurs
"opportunity costs," namely, lost earnings
from not working. Young people from families
living on the edge cannot rely on family
support. They may be fortunate to have it during
the primary grades, but if they go as far
as postsecondary education they are on their
own. Therefore, they need low- or no-cost
education, but they also need a way to earn
money while they are enrolled. Young people
who are expected to contribute to the family's
well-being need money for that purpose, over
and above tuition and their own sustenance.
German apprenticeship is designed as a
work/learning experience, with wages held low
enough to ensure that learning prevails. YouthBuild
was created specifically for poor youth
who are no longer enrolled in schooL Earning
wages is a critical incentive for participation.
Assistance in obtaining the GED or a high
school diploma is a central goal of the program,
enabling and encouraging graduates to enter
post-secondary education. Both TRY and CCS
are designed primarily to help young adults
earn a decent living. Yet they educate and train
young people as certainly as if they were formal
educational institutions. They have only informal
links to formal education. Strengthening
those links seems a desirable direction for
future development both as a means of increasing
the emphasis on learning but also as a basis
for conferring formal educational credentials
on participants. One of the strengths of German
apprenticeship is that it yields a formal credential
that is negotiable in the labor market. It formalizes
what was originally an informal mode
of teaching and learning both by certifying the
knowledge and skills apprentices gain and by
linking work-based learning to schooling.
German apprenticeship is also exemplary in
exploiting quite systematically the pedagogical
power of workplaces. Rather than treating the
need to earn money as a distraction from learning,
new institutions can be designed to teach
through work. YouthBuild espouses this philosophy
and both CCS and TRY have made
progress in this direction.
Responsible Social Roles
As has been noted, rolelessness is a threat during
the transition to adulthood. With "regular"
19
jobs hard to find and the role of student inaccessible,
apprenticeship, Youthbuild, CCS,
and TRY provide respected social roles. Young
people who would otherwise be unemployed
or picking up odd jobs have stable employment
as well as earnings. They are part of an
organization that values them and in which
their peers as well as adults encourage and
support them. Filling new institutional roles
builds a young person's sense of identity; it is
part of the answer to the key question: '"Who
are youT'
Youth Leadership and Civic
Engagement
Karen Pittman (Pittman, Irby. Tolman.
Yohalem, & Ferber. 2002), who is one of the
~T 	 best thinkers about youth issues and unmatched
as a communicator about those issues, has dis­s
tinguished things done to youth-services­ts
from things done for youth-supports-andIn
both from things done with youth-opportu­al
T- nities. Services, supports, and opportunities
are all needed and often provided by the same
~T institutions. However, Pittman reminds us
g- that when youth are viewed as problems to be
solved rather than resources to be developed,
LIs services tend to predominate. We have written
of institutions supporting the transition to
n­ adulthood. but the cases discussed are excelIT­
lent examples of creating opportunities for
:Ie youth to take responsibility for themselves and
he others. That is how they promote agency.
YouthBuild pays the most explicit atten­
m
'Y
tion of the institutions described to enhancing
in young people's ability and willingness to
:aI participate in democratic decision makhe
ing. The leadership program not only pren­
pares participants to take leadership roles
ch in YouthBuild, it aims to make them more
11- engaged and more effective citizens of their
de communities. German apprentices in larger
firms may be elected by their peers to sit on
a youth committee of the works council, a
fixture in German workplaces that gives workllf-
ers, through their unions, a voice in corpoII"
rate governance. The Jugendbeirat speaks on
Features of Asset-Building Institutions 521
behalf of apprentices but also provides a kind
of apprenticeship in joint decision making.
TRY and CCS appear to be remarkably
youth directed. Young workers developed the
CCS business model while the partners were
trying to get a different model started. TRY
has been redesigned at least twice in response
to participants' needs. Although youth empowerment
such as this may not lead directly to
civic engagement, the agency it fosters and the
experience it gives young people in defining
their interests and expressing them publicly
seem likely to carryover into other arenas,
especially civil society.
Proliferating Pathways
Some young people follow career paths that
are very clear and very direct. Consider a
young woman who has wanted to be a doctor
since she was five years old. Given good
advice, intelligence, hard work, support, a high
school internship in a hospital, and some luck,
she is likely to graduate from high school with
a strong record, enroll in a selective college
and excel at her premed courses, do well on
the MCATs, enroll in the best medical school
that admits her, accept the internship that best
suits her needs, pass her state exams, and begin
a residency that will lead to a satisfying and
productive practice. The professions are distinct
precisely in the specificity of preparation
that qualifies people to practice them. Entry is
allowed only through certain gateways, Some
who succeed may do other things first, but
everyone must pass through the same
ways, without exception.
Most occupations do not have such clear.
and rigid, entry requirements, and most people's
career paths are far less direct. German
apprenticeship and associated laws and practices
create specific gateways for skilled and
semi-skilled occupations. The presence of
nificant gateways has two competing effects
on young people's career paths. On the one
hand, they clearly mark career paths. They
make them transparent. The would-be doctor
knows precisely what she must do. On the
522 The Transition to Adulthood
other hand, they make those paths difficult to
traverse. Gates not only swing open to allow
people through, they remain closed to those
without the key. The presence in Germany of
precise requirements for certification as an
auto mechanic tells a young man just what
he must do to be able to work on cars. But if he
changes his mind and decides he would rather
work on auto bodies, he has to start over and
follow a different path through a different set
of gates. Career paths are, under these circumstances,
relatively impermeable; it is hard to
move along them (Hamilton, 1994).
An ideal institution supporting the transition
to adulthood gives young people both a
map to make career paths more transparentadvice
and assistance on career paths--and
the kind of experience and training that helps
them through the gates that mark the path.
Institutions that create multiple pathways to
the same career goals are especially desirable.
Recent adaptations of German apprenticeship
have enabled apprentices to move
back into full-time schooling. Pathways are
being created in some occupations so that, for
example, cabinet makers can become interior
designers.
Mentoring
Among the four institutions, only TRY formally
designated a set ofadults as mentors. The
role was created after high default and dropout
rates forced the rethinking of the microfinance
scheme, resulting in more explicit attention
to nonfinancial issues. Selecting mentors to
match the issues participants had identified as
important to them was an enlightened design
feature. Tellingly, the women who qualified as
mentors were also strong candidates for other
positions, leading to high turnover despite
attractive rates of pay.
But mentoring does not depend upon people
who are formally designated as mentors
(Hamilton & Hamilton, 2004). By our definition,
mentors are adults outside the family who
offer the kind of advice and assistance that a
parent or other family might be expected to
provide. As mentoring programs have proliferated,
a positive development, mentoring has
come to be identified with programs. But the
programs exist to synthesize a natural relationship
that has been impeded by age and social
class segregation and by hyper-busyness. Most
mentors are naturally part of a young person's
social network, not introduced by a mentoring
program. In all four of the institutions we
have described, adults are available who are
responsible for working with young people to
help them achieve their goals. Some of them
become mentors.
Mentoring connotes a relationship that goes
beyond the limits of a position description
and endures through changes in the organizational
relationships of the people involved.
A teacher who instructs a student in class and
works with the student after class is doing her
job. When the teacher also advises the student
on her educational pathway and on other topics,
such as relations with parents and personal
values, she has moved beyond the teaching
role to become a mentor as well. Becoming
a mentor often means that the relationship
extends beyond the walls of the school and the
duration of the school year as well.
When mentoring is defined in this way,
rather than in terms of a formally defined organizational
role as in TRY, it becomes difficult,
if not impossible, to determine whether and to
what extent mentoring is happening within a
program or system without conducting empirical
research. However, the structure and functions
of all four institutions appear to provide
opportunities for mentoring relationships to
develop between participants and adult staff
but also other adults who are involved by
bringing them together around common goals.
German apprenticeship illustrates the possibilities
well. Taking on an apprentice obligates an
employer to provide learning opportunities. A
designated person has day-to-day responsibility
for teaching an apprentice. In a small shop,
that might be the owner. In a large firm, a coordinator
of apprentices arranges placements in
rotation so that each apprentice learns about
the functions of multiple departments, with a
series of different supervisors. But apprentices
may form their closest relationships with other
adults they get to know at work.
CONCLUSIONS
For large numbers of young people, the transition
to adulthood is a journey of discovery,
a time to learn more about themselves, others,
the worlds of work and citizenship, and
their places in those worlds. Higher education,
employment, family, and institutions of civil
society provide them with support, notably
in the form of opportunities to gain a sense
of purpose and agency, to build their human
capital, and to acquire social capital. As norms
change regarding the duration of the transition
and the sequence of steps that constitute
it, advantages accumulate with those who are
able to use higher education as an institution in
which to make or at least start the transition.
The labor market, which once offered jobs that
would support a family to young men whose
education stopped at high school, has become
a more forbidding place in the United States
and other countries. Many employers will hire
older teenagers or people in their early twenties,
but they are concentrated in low-wage,
low-skill positions with few opportunities for
moving up a career ladder. Young women of
the same age are unlikely to devote themselves
to raising children; economic necessity forces
most to work and to build the human capital
they will need to contribute steadily to the
family's sustenance.
A prolonged transition to adulthood without
benefit of higher education can be valuable
but it can also be a fruitless delay. To enable
more young people and especially those from
poor families to take full advantage of a longer
period between the time when they are physically
mature and the time when they assume
adult roles, young people experiencing it need
to inhabit institutions that more closely match
the new realities of this period of life. New
Conclusions 523
and adapted institutions can provide the sense
of purpose and agency, the human and social
capital that young people need to be productive
workers, engaged citizens. and nurturing
family members.
Enrolling more young people in higher education
is certainly desirable. but it is no substitute
for the declining capacity of employment
institutions and families to support the transition
to adulthood. Large increases in enrollment
would require larger investments in higher
education than taxpayers are prepared to make.
Some young people do not like and do not do
well in school. And if everyone went to college,
some graduates would still have to do work that
does not require a college degree.
New institutions must be attuned to the needs
ofyoung people from poor families as they enter
adulthood. Like residential colleges, these new
institutions must offer the supports and opportunities
required during the transition. Ideally,
they will contribute to reducing the reproduction
of social class, making it possible for young
people to exceed the SES into which they were
born. We have examined one well-developed
system, German apprenticeship, for clues to
what such institutions might look like. Three
programs for low-income youth, YouthBuild in
the United States and the Community Cleaning
Service and Tap and Reposition Youth in Kenya,
point in some new directions.
Perhaps the most important lesson to be tlearned from examining these institutions is
that more than one institution is needed. Rather
than trying to create a single institution that does
everything for all young people, we should think
about the ecology of institutions in which young
people become adults. German apprenticeship
gains strength from bestriding the educational
system on one side and workplaces on the other.
It provides a gateway into respected and wellpaid
occupations. But it does so with a certain
rigidity. Young people who neither graduate
from universities or from postsecondary vocational
institutions nor complete an apprenticeship
have few options. The path to a skilled
worker's certificate is well marked; deviations
524 The Transition to Adulthood
are discouraged. Young people with immigrant
family backgrounds have not been well served
by this institution and adaptations to improve
their prospects are just being created to adapt to
the structural limitations of the fornler East.
In the United States, young people who do not
earn collcge degrees make their way into adulthood
via multiple paths, but many lose valuable
time and fail to acquire in a timely way the
assets they need. Paths with more clearly visible
gates and clear information about how to pass
through those gates would help. YouthBuild is
an example of an organization that helps mostly
minority high school dropouts in poor urban
communities gain the purpose and agency they
need to move into productive paths and gain a
powerful combination of construction-related
skills but also academics and civic competence,
enabling graduates to go on to many different
fields, especially human services. But, as participants
pointed out, YouthBuild cannot do it
all alone. Other suppOitive institutions must be
visible and accessible to participants.
The exemplars described here suggest
that such institutions will have some common
features. Although many will be no more
than programs, they will have the potential
to become systems. Rather than maintaining
the separation between work and learning
that typifies institutions for children. they will
enable young people to earn a living while
they continue to learn. Being a participant
in these institutions will give young people
responsible and respected roles, avoiding
the fate of rolelessness. Becoming an adult
means assuming additional civic responsibilities,
and these institutions give at least some
young people experience and instruction in
civic competencies, including leadership. New
institutions, like those we have described, will
be hybrids, linking public with private in ways
that challenge that dichotomy. Rather than
constituting a single channel through which
all young people must pass to adulthood,
they will create a plethora of pathways from
which young people may choose. That variety
heightens the need for mentoring from caring
adults beyond the family, including both formally
designated and informal or natural mentors.
Like the creators of YouthBuild, CCS and
TRY, we need to turn our collective capacity
for social entrepreneurship to the task of overcoming
the structural lag that now leaves too
many poor young people with inadequate support
during the transition to adulthood.
ENDNOTES
I. 	 Additional detail and extensive documentation may be found in
Hamilton (1990).
2, 	 We are greally indebted to Profeswrs Drs. Burkhart Lutz and
HoUe Grunert for convening an informal seminar ~ilh their col~
leagues on institutional support for the lnm<.,ition to auulthood
and recent dl!velopmcnts in apprenticeship in easlern GermanYt
atth Lniversity of Halle. Germany. September 24.2007.
:1.	 We rely for this description on the report by Erulkar. et. a!.
(2006) and the evaluation conducted by Erulkar and Chon
(2005), Page numbers arc provided only for spc(ific informa·
tion in those documents.
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HANDBOOK OF
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY
THIRD EDITION
Volume 2: Contextual Influences on Adolescent
Development
Edited By
RICHARD M. LERNER 

LAURENCE STEINBERG 

G1WILEY 

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.