Alan Reifman's Blog

Vox.com has an article putting today's college-campus protests over Gaza, Israel, and the Palestinians in the context of US campus protests of the past 60 years, including those over Civil Rights, South African apartheid, and the Vietnam War. The article's interviews with researchers of student activism suggest that some things we are seeing currently are similar to what happened in earlier decades, whereas some present developments are not.

It is the Vox article's life-stage explanation of prote...

Higher education -- whether one goes to college or not -- affects the lives of millions of Americans in the emerging-adult age-range, and not necessarily for the better. So says Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch in his 2022 book After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics -- And How to Fix It.

With the possible exception of youth whose parents are willing and able to pay annual costs approaching, in some cases, $75,000 for tuition, room, and...

The US Census Bureau issued a report roughly two weeks ago on trends in 25-34 year-olds' homeownership between 2000-2019 (link). The report notes that, "The impact on the housing market of the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020, is not captured in this dataset." Even before COVID, however, the trend was not favorable and it is hard to imagine how young adults' rate of homeownership could have gotten better during the pandemic.*

The data we do have show that young adults' homeownership rose sl...

The US Census Bureau released a report a few days ago, providing extensive marriage statistics on individuals born from 1940-1994 (link). Someone born in 1940 would be 82 today, whereas someone born in 1994 would be 28. The data are grouped into five-year birth bunches (1940-1944, 1945-1949, etc.). 

As shown in the following screen capture (on which I've literally connected the dots in yellow highlighter for ease of viewing), the percentage of people married by age 25 has plummeted during the yea...

Earlier this week, results came out from one of the major US substance-use surveys, namely the annual Monitoring the Future project conducted by the University of Michigan. The headline of UM's news release was "Marijuana, hallucinogen use at all-time high* among young adults." However, I think some of the alcohol-related findings are also quite interesting. 

Regarding past-year marijuana use (i.e., any use of marijuana in the past year), 30.8% of 19-30 year-olds in the year 1988 had smoked some ...

My new textbook Journeys through Emerging Adulthood has now been published. A free preview of Chapter 1 is available via Amazon and the book's publisher, Routledge/Taylor & Francis. The book is the culmination of my 20+ years of doing research on emerging adulthood and 14 years of teaching the course Development in Young Adulthood at Texas Tech University. It was a labor of love to write.
I'm happy to discuss possible adoptions with anyone. Some university departments of human development and fam...

Five-Thirty-Eight has a piece today examining the low percentage (slightly below 40%) of 18-29 year-old Americans who approve of the job President Joe Biden is doing. This approval rate is not that different from that of Americans as a whole; however, considering young voters' overwhelming support of Biden in the 2020 election, their diminished approval is highly notable. The article explores many possible reasons for Biden's dip among young adults, but one in particular meshes with the study of...

As I noted in my previous entry, "teens and young adults like to socialize, pure and simple." Nowhere is this more clear than at those U.S. universities whose administrators have opted to bring students back to campus for in-person instruction of some form. 

Inside the classroom, the combination of instructors' ability to monitor students' mask-wearing, the spacing of available seats, and potential peer pressure to conform from students who do not want their classes to be disrupted by mask-refuse...

Click on graph to enlarge.
The graph above -- from South Carolina's Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), showing the state's COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population by age group from March 7 to June 20 -- documents a trend we're hearing a lot about. A lot of cases during the recent wave are among young adults.*

According to the above-linked DHEC report, "Since April 4, data from the agency shows that there has been a 413.9% increase in newly reported COVID-19 cases among the 21-30 ...

The Pew Research Center, a little over a month ago, released a report entitled "Millennial Life: How Young Adulthood Today Compares with Prior Generations" (LINK). The report defines Millennials as those born from 1981-1996, making them 22-37 at the time of the analyses (2018). The researchers then compared Millennials to members of three prior generations (X, Baby Boom, and Silent) when members of those generations were likewise 22-37.*

Millennials are more educated and less likely to be married...