Crossing the Canyon: What Happens After High School
Summary of a study conducted by researchers at Teach for America’s Reinvention Lab
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The following post was authored by Elisabeth Booze and describes research done with co-investigator, Colleen Keating-Crawford and supported by Teach For America’s Reinvention Lab. The Reinvention Lab is an exploratory space within Teach For America where they support the future of learning, and cultivate a broad, intergenerational community to pursue equitable innovation and system-level transformation. I met these two creative researchers when I was invited to a gathering to celebrate and interpret their work. I am honored and thrilled that they agreed to write a post and facilitate a gathering for the School of Thought community.
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Imagine a canyon cutting between childhood and adulthood. The cliffs of the canyon are steep, craggy, and crumbling. Looking down it, there is no way to determine the best, safest, or fastest routes.
This is the canyon crossing. It’s an image that came from our interviews with both young people and adults as they shared their experiences in navigating life after high school. Crossing the canyon is challenging, and young people are made to feel that getting successfully across is fully their responsibility.
For some, it feels like the canyon could swallow them whole.
The Big Idea
In Spring 2023, the Reinvention Lab conducted ethnographic research around this canyon crossing. We spoke with 60 interviewees, both young people and adults. We were curious about these central questions:
What options exist for young people, especially those from low-income or first-generation backgrounds, after completing high school?
How do young people perceive and approach these options?
Making Big Ideas Usable
Here’s a teaser of the themes that emerged from our research.
Theme 1: The Three Pillars
A successful canyon crossing means securing three key pillars of adulthood:
Economic mobility: Making good money that sustains them in the middle class and enables them to build generational wealth.
Self-discovery & belonging: They can find themselves and find their people.
Societal legitimacy: They will be received and treated by society as a trustworthy, capable person with social capital.
Theme 2: College for All ≠ Success for All
In the United States, we talk about college like it's a guarantee to success. For youth today, college is often marketed as "the" pathway - the standard against which all else is considered an "alternative." But college may be misaligned to or insufficient in providing the pillars young people needed to get from traversing this canyon.
Young interviewees expressed deep insecurity and struggle with achieving the three pillars of successful adulthood. Witnessing the challenges faced by those slightly older than them contributed to their sense that this canyon crossing doesn't align with the expectations set by the adults in their lives.
Similar to other American institutions like home-buying or marriage, today’s youth are desiring to ‘hack the system’ or take a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach to college; yet they feel thwarted by the system's design. This leaves them disappointed, dissatisfied, and depressed about attaining their three pillars, fostering a sense of failure and isolation, only further exacerbated by the deepening digital divide.
Theme 3: An Emerging Ecosystem Framework
As practitioners in the educational ecosystem, we each have a unique role in supporting youth to attain all three pillars: economic mobility, socio-emotional development, and societal legitimacy. We need to operate as a true ecosystem to support youth in this challenging landscape, where no one path fits all or provides all that today's youth need.
On today’s canyon, there are:
Trail Guides who know the trails and landscape very well, who promise to personally guide you through.
Transport Helicopters who know the trails and landscape very well, who promise to personally guide you through.
Bridges that are carefully built over time with coordination from both sides to ensure a highly stable crossing. ...
Mapmakers who are a new set of players that make and share adaptive maps of both the complex terrain and the effectiveness of some of the other players providing transport.
Successfully transitioning from childhood to adulthood as a young person in America is more complex than ever. Young people find the transition overwhelming, confusing, disparate, and disempowering as it centers a system versus centering them. It is time for adults to work together as a symbiotic ecosystem that creates clarity, integration, and youth-centered empowerment.
It is time to build better than a new system. It is time for an ecosystem: one that is decentralized and decoupled from college, where all practitioners work in concert for youth. In an ecosystem, symbiotic relationships foster adaptable flexibility, creativity, and diverse connections. Within this ecosystem, a more equitable future lies in radical collaboration, wherein we convene to understand and design together anew amid these large, systemic issues.
Artwork for this piece by
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School of Thought 2024 Quarterly Gatherings
Connecting and Improving Youth’s Post Secondary Journey; with Teach For America’s Reinvention Lab Featuring: Colleen Keating and Elizabeth Booze
January 18th 4pm EST
Join to be inspired by this research and the visuals that accompany it. Colleen Keating-Crawford and Elizabeth Booze conducted an ethnographic study in 2023 on what life looks like after high school, which resulted in beautiful stories and graphics. They will share them in this interactive (super fun) presentation. They offer a personalized follow up for paid subscribers.
Human Listening, Machine Learning, Community Understanding with MIT Media Lab’s Cortico. Featuring Alex Berman and Hana Carey, March 19th in Philadelphia
In this session, Hana Carey and Alex Kelly Berman from Cortico, a non-profit that partners closely MIT Media Lab’s Center for Constructive Communication, will share strategies for engaging in constructive conversations with those who hold different worldviews. The idea is that building skills for human learning, when combined with machine (AI) learning brings us to broader conversations and more possibilities to cross views that divide us.
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