Aspiring Adults Adrift : Tentative Transitions of College Graduates by Richard, Roksa, Josipa Arum

Aspiring Adults is the much-anticipated follow-up study to our 2011 Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the book that took higher education by storm. Using data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the authors argued in AA that the majority of college students don’t learn much in their first two years of college. The authors published the more quantitative parts of this follow-up study with a free online publication. Aspiring Adults , then, is the trade version of their findings, replete with a good amount of qualitative material from many interviews with students. The authors document how recent college graduates attempted to make post-college transitions from the spring of 2009 through the summer of 2011, during a particularly difficult period for the U.S. economy. They found a high level of variability in graduates’ employment outcomes, living arrangements, relationships, and levels of civic engagement, and they describe how colleges and universities are implicated in shaping the lives of these young adults. Arum and Roksa provide a rich description of how students’ lives varied during and after college as well as how these patterns corresponded with the general collegiate skills individuals left college with as well as the majors they chose and the institutions they attended. The authors pay particular attention as to how college graduates in their study understand and speak about their experiences. If individuals have taken on extensive debt to socialize rather than study in college, and as emerging adults are later underemployed and living at home with their parents, but simultaneously report high levels of individual satisfaction and well-being, is there really a social problem requiring social reform or institutional remedy?