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The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School
Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager’s first year after high school. But the reality is really quite different. As Tim Clydesdale reports in The First Year Out, teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after graduation effectively. But, like many good things, this comes at a cost.
Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, Clydesdale reveals how teens settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But Clydesdale finds that teens also stow away their identities—religious, racial, political, or otherwise—during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur.
The First Year Out is an invaluable resource for anyone caught up in the storm and stress of working with these young adults.
Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, Clydesdale reveals how teens settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But Clydesdale finds that teens also stow away their identities—religious, racial, political, or otherwise—during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur.
The First Year Out is an invaluable resource for anyone caught up in the storm and stress of working with these young adults.
239 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 17, 2018
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” –James Arthur Baldwin
It has been a while since I was a freshman in college, but I can still feel that sense of being lost, overwhelmed, and utterly confused. Entering college my goal was to finish school, graduate, and start my “life” as soon as possible. I isolated myself emotionally, stalling any authentic development because I was simply too afraid to see my worldview bubble burst. Instead of thriving, I was purely focused on surviving.
The First Year Out by Tim Clydesdale is a quick snapshot of a teenager’s first year into higher education. Clydesdale follows the lives of over fifty students, starting with them while they finish high school and following up with them after their first year into the college world.
Though society typically portrays college students as reckless party people interested only in drugs, alcohol, and sex, Clydesdale paints for us a more realistic, subdued freshmen class. In their first year out, students are looking for one big thing: daily life management. With so many changes happening within only a few months, students are simply looking for a way to adjust and cope quickly with unavoidable challenges ahead.
Clearly, some turn to unhealthy methods such as drugs and alcohol while some manage the challenges quite successfully. However most, according to Clydesdale, create a “lockbox” for their identity which includes religious/spiritual, ethical, political, and intellectual worldviews as a way to survive while they deal with daily life management. Most college students do not approach these developments until later into their college experience.
All in all, I think is a great book. I grew a little weary every time Clydesdale had to describe an interviewee. It seemed like every other sentence he was telling me the gender, race, and socioeconomic class of a student, which is important information but it does not make for smooth reading.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the freshmen year experience.
It has been a while since I was a freshman in college, but I can still feel that sense of being lost, overwhelmed, and utterly confused. Entering college my goal was to finish school, graduate, and start my “life” as soon as possible. I isolated myself emotionally, stalling any authentic development because I was simply too afraid to see my worldview bubble burst. Instead of thriving, I was purely focused on surviving.
The First Year Out by Tim Clydesdale is a quick snapshot of a teenager’s first year into higher education. Clydesdale follows the lives of over fifty students, starting with them while they finish high school and following up with them after their first year into the college world.
Though society typically portrays college students as reckless party people interested only in drugs, alcohol, and sex, Clydesdale paints for us a more realistic, subdued freshmen class. In their first year out, students are looking for one big thing: daily life management. With so many changes happening within only a few months, students are simply looking for a way to adjust and cope quickly with unavoidable challenges ahead.
Clearly, some turn to unhealthy methods such as drugs and alcohol while some manage the challenges quite successfully. However most, according to Clydesdale, create a “lockbox” for their identity which includes religious/spiritual, ethical, political, and intellectual worldviews as a way to survive while they deal with daily life management. Most college students do not approach these developments until later into their college experience.
All in all, I think is a great book. I grew a little weary every time Clydesdale had to describe an interviewee. It seemed like every other sentence he was telling me the gender, race, and socioeconomic class of a student, which is important information but it does not make for smooth reading.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the freshmen year experience.
January 7, 2017
Although this book’s research is now 10 years old, it still gives impetus to educators and those concerned with helping our young people learn to think and reason, to continue teaching, while communicating with and giving input into high school and college students’ lives. If you choose to read it, definitely read chapter one, then the last page or two of chapters 2-5 to summarize his thoughts and chapter six as a conclusion.
May 3, 2011
This book has one star only because you aren't allowed to give zero stars -- zero stars here simply means "not rated." But trust, if I could give this zero stars, I would. By the time I finished this book, I felt genuinely embarrassed for UChicago Press that they had published it. What made it so horrible? Let us count the ways.
1) Excessively normative writing I don't think I have ever read a piece of work by an academic sociologist that contained such strong normative language. Clydesdale rests much of his argument on regular reference to "mainstream American culture" and "mainstream American teens," and while he does attempt to define the former (though intriguingly, never the latter), he never makes clear where it is that he gets his definitions from. That said, his own preoccupations pop up with astonishing regularity. He is clearly chagrined that the teens he interviews seem unaffected by the events of 9/11, and he advocates strongly that religious teens, and particularly Evangelical Christians attending Christian colleges, show the greatest moral development and expand their learning the most in college. Hmm, where did Clydesdale go to college? Oh right, Wheaton. Oh no, not the Wheaton College in Massachusetts that's a clearinghouse for preppies who didn't get into Trinity or Tufts. I mean the Wheaton in Illinois. Yes, that's right, the Christian one.
1b) Excessively normative evaluations It's clear throughout his writing that Clydesdale believes he knows what is best for his subjects, and has insights into their lives that they lack -- treacherous territory for a sociologist (and particularly for one who didn't even do all his interviews himself). But Clydesdale attempts to lead his reader to share his judgments, often in embarrassingly overt ways. Case in point: He lauds the findings of the Independent Women's Forum's report Hanging out, hooking up, and hoping for Mr. Right. Does he mention that they're a conservative group? Does he mention that one of the authors of this report isn't even an academic? Does he pause to consider that the report is very much based on a deeply biological, binary understanding of gender difference, and that its findings imply that women would be better off with the gender norms of the 1950s? Noooo.
But then later, when he discusses the findings of UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, and particularly sociologist Alexander Astin, who has been their most prominent researcher for many years, he spends a few pages attempting to discredit them. He goes through all the reasons why HERI -- a non-partisan research center -- would have a personal or I guess institutional stake in promoting certain kinds of findings but not others, and why we should probably not trust their research. This in spite of the fact that compared to as blatantly agenda-driven a group as the Independent Women's Forum, HERI is, quite frankly, unimpeachable (and also has several decades' worth of longitudinal research that has been utilized by a wide range of scholars, as opposed to this one IWF report that has been mainly used by folks who'd like women to shut up and get back in the kitchen).
Why does he do this? Because he agrees with what IWF are trying to argue, while HERI's findings are disagreeable to the claims he's making (which is a whole other deal, given that he attempts to make claims in this book that are well beyond what he can reasonably infer from the data he has). Okay, fine, so he's blatant in promoting his own agenda. My question is, again, why would UChicago Press let him do this?
2) Excessive ambitions it doesn't even begin to reach You can think, in your deepest, most secret place, that your book will be on par with, and comparable to, Middletown, The Lonely Crowd, or Habits of the Heart. I'd say it's maybe acceptable to say it to someone else if you're really drunk, and they're so drunk that they a) probably won't understand what you're saying and b) even if they do, won't remember you said it later. But to actually come right out and say that in the first chapter of your book? Oh honey. This is no Street Corner Society. You're not even close. This is more of a "I can't believe it wasn't self-published," not a "people will still be talking about this book decades from now."
3) Excessive use of metaphors You know when the New Yorker can't quite fill a column, and so they'll pop in a funny little example of a newspaper's gaffe? Sometimes they're "Constabulary notes from all over," but often they're "Block that metaphor!", examples of sentences that are laden with multiple metaphors often working at cross-purposes with one another.
If I could, I would do a "block that metaphor" on this entire book. I started to make a list of them, but I got too tired by the second chapter. At that point, here's what he'd already busted out: Identity lockboxes, life tent, campground life, dark cloud, floods and mud, eating your vegetables, wobbly table, two pedestals ("new economic realities of global America" and "popular moral culture of mainstream America"), board game (which he spends pages upon pages describing -- sort of like a crap version of Monopoly. He goes through different spaces you can land on, cards you can draw, games pieces, rules of play, the whole deal), buffets, a beach party, surfing... I mean it just goes and goes. If this is what this book looked like after an editor was done with it, I can not even begin to fathom what this book looked like before.
In all, I can't say enough bad things about this book. I almost feel like I should go back through all my other reviews and raise those one-star books up to at least two, because this one has set a new low, and in retrospect I'm sure all those other books are better than this one. Words cannot begin to describe how much I hated this book. Clydesdale takes such an unapologetically polemical stance, yet pretends the entire time that he is a disinterested social scientist. His personal prejudices seep through every page. It was, for me, genuinely an uncomfortable book to read.
1) Excessively normative writing I don't think I have ever read a piece of work by an academic sociologist that contained such strong normative language. Clydesdale rests much of his argument on regular reference to "mainstream American culture" and "mainstream American teens," and while he does attempt to define the former (though intriguingly, never the latter), he never makes clear where it is that he gets his definitions from. That said, his own preoccupations pop up with astonishing regularity. He is clearly chagrined that the teens he interviews seem unaffected by the events of 9/11, and he advocates strongly that religious teens, and particularly Evangelical Christians attending Christian colleges, show the greatest moral development and expand their learning the most in college. Hmm, where did Clydesdale go to college? Oh right, Wheaton. Oh no, not the Wheaton College in Massachusetts that's a clearinghouse for preppies who didn't get into Trinity or Tufts. I mean the Wheaton in Illinois. Yes, that's right, the Christian one.
1b) Excessively normative evaluations It's clear throughout his writing that Clydesdale believes he knows what is best for his subjects, and has insights into their lives that they lack -- treacherous territory for a sociologist (and particularly for one who didn't even do all his interviews himself). But Clydesdale attempts to lead his reader to share his judgments, often in embarrassingly overt ways. Case in point: He lauds the findings of the Independent Women's Forum's report Hanging out, hooking up, and hoping for Mr. Right. Does he mention that they're a conservative group? Does he mention that one of the authors of this report isn't even an academic? Does he pause to consider that the report is very much based on a deeply biological, binary understanding of gender difference, and that its findings imply that women would be better off with the gender norms of the 1950s? Noooo.
But then later, when he discusses the findings of UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, and particularly sociologist Alexander Astin, who has been their most prominent researcher for many years, he spends a few pages attempting to discredit them. He goes through all the reasons why HERI -- a non-partisan research center -- would have a personal or I guess institutional stake in promoting certain kinds of findings but not others, and why we should probably not trust their research. This in spite of the fact that compared to as blatantly agenda-driven a group as the Independent Women's Forum, HERI is, quite frankly, unimpeachable (and also has several decades' worth of longitudinal research that has been utilized by a wide range of scholars, as opposed to this one IWF report that has been mainly used by folks who'd like women to shut up and get back in the kitchen).
Why does he do this? Because he agrees with what IWF are trying to argue, while HERI's findings are disagreeable to the claims he's making (which is a whole other deal, given that he attempts to make claims in this book that are well beyond what he can reasonably infer from the data he has). Okay, fine, so he's blatant in promoting his own agenda. My question is, again, why would UChicago Press let him do this?
2) Excessive ambitions it doesn't even begin to reach You can think, in your deepest, most secret place, that your book will be on par with, and comparable to, Middletown, The Lonely Crowd, or Habits of the Heart. I'd say it's maybe acceptable to say it to someone else if you're really drunk, and they're so drunk that they a) probably won't understand what you're saying and b) even if they do, won't remember you said it later. But to actually come right out and say that in the first chapter of your book? Oh honey. This is no Street Corner Society. You're not even close. This is more of a "I can't believe it wasn't self-published," not a "people will still be talking about this book decades from now."
3) Excessive use of metaphors You know when the New Yorker can't quite fill a column, and so they'll pop in a funny little example of a newspaper's gaffe? Sometimes they're "Constabulary notes from all over," but often they're "Block that metaphor!", examples of sentences that are laden with multiple metaphors often working at cross-purposes with one another.
If I could, I would do a "block that metaphor" on this entire book. I started to make a list of them, but I got too tired by the second chapter. At that point, here's what he'd already busted out: Identity lockboxes, life tent, campground life, dark cloud, floods and mud, eating your vegetables, wobbly table, two pedestals ("new economic realities of global America" and "popular moral culture of mainstream America"), board game (which he spends pages upon pages describing -- sort of like a crap version of Monopoly. He goes through different spaces you can land on, cards you can draw, games pieces, rules of play, the whole deal), buffets, a beach party, surfing... I mean it just goes and goes. If this is what this book looked like after an editor was done with it, I can not even begin to fathom what this book looked like before.
In all, I can't say enough bad things about this book. I almost feel like I should go back through all my other reviews and raise those one-star books up to at least two, because this one has set a new low, and in retrospect I'm sure all those other books are better than this one. Words cannot begin to describe how much I hated this book. Clydesdale takes such an unapologetically polemical stance, yet pretends the entire time that he is a disinterested social scientist. His personal prejudices seep through every page. It was, for me, genuinely an uncomfortable book to read.
August 16, 2016
Clydesdale's work is well written and spans the academic and general audiences. I'm quite interested in what he has to say about the "lock box" mentality first year college students have regarding their identities -- they're more interested in "maintaining" their identities and figuring out how to keep up with their teenage Joneses than they are in joining larger cultural, social and political communities. At least, that's what Clydesdale determines is true about his studied populations: those who came of age 1999-2004. I wonder if the same holds true for this year's crop of college first years, given the current state of economic, political and social upheaval.
October 28, 2012
Clydesdale interviews high school seniors and follows them through their first year of college. He finds that college freshman are not intellectually engaged during their "First Year Out" and that faculty should not expect them to be since they are too busy managing their lives. He states that few students appreciate the liberal arts and the ones that do will become faculty or go work in academe. His recommendation was to begin working with students on finding a sense of purpose either prior to the senior year of high school and/or after the freshman year.
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January 26, 2010I don't think I've ever discussed a sociology book with such a wide range of people. I found the findings in this book so depressing I don't want them to write, and I'd love for someone to tell me they're not. This book made me think -- about sociology and about parenting and about American culture.
January 10, 2011
This book has its biases, but I think it opens up a lot of excellent insight into the path of spirituality among young people living independently for the first time.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews