The teenagers of the 1990s will surely be remembered as the ambitious generation. Overwhelmingly, teenagers today expect to graduate from college and work as professionals. Large numbers expect to become physicians, lawyers, or business managers; few would consider working as machinists, secretaries, or plumbers.
Contrary to popular descriptions of teenagers as slackers, the majority of young people graduate from college, do not use hard drugs, do not commit acts of violence, and do not have babies in their teenage years. Most adolescents are concerned about their futures and believe that obtaining a bachelor's degree is the necessary first step in moving up the economic and social ladder.
Although ambitious, many adolescents find it difficult to fulfill their dreams. Often unaware of the steps that they can take to help them achieve their ambitions, most teenagers begin the transition from high school to college or to the labor market without a clear educational or career path. However, anchoring ambitions in an understanding of the relationship between educational credentials and later employment opportunities can be advantageous.
Some adolescents have complementary educational and occupational goals, or what we call aligned ambitions. These teenagers know the type of job they want and how much education they need to get it. They are more likely to select a path or construct a life plan that enhances their chances of reaching their occupational goals.
Life plans are important for transforming ambitions from dreams to everyday goals. Such plans vary in form and are influenced by families and schools. Coherent and realistic life plans are especially useful for choosing a path that leads to success in adulthood. Plans give adolescents a sense of order, encourage them to engage in strategic effort and to sustain high levels of motivation, and help them use familial and organizational resources.
Teenagers with high ambitions but no clear life plan are misaligned; they are drifting dreamers who have limited knowledge about their chosen occupations, about educational requirements, or about future demands for these occupations. Without such information, their life plans are neither realistic nor well formed. These drifting dreamers come from all racial and ethnic groups and all social classes.
The Ambitions of Today's Teenagers
High school seniors in the 1990s plan to obtain more advanced-level education than any other group of seniors since the 1950s. In 1955, slightly more than 40 percent of seniors expected to complete their formal education by the end of high school. By 1992, only 5 percent expected to complete their formal education with high school. A dramatic increase in the number of adolescents expecting to obtain a college or an advanced degree accompanied this decline. In 1955, slightly more than 30 percent of high school seniors planned to finish college. By 1992, however, nearly 70 percent of seniors expected to earn at least a college degree. The most significant increase has been in the number of seniors who intend to earn an advanced degree. That number doubled between 1972 and 1992, from 14 percent to more than 30 percent.
This significant rise in educational expectations is not confined to any particular group. The increase is found among students from different racial and ethnic groups and from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The educational expectations of both males and females have increased, with those of female students rising faster than those of males.
This rise in educational expectations has been matched with a significant rise in occupational aspirations. Since 1955, the percentage of seniors aspiring to professional jobs has steadily increased, to more than 70 percent in 1992. The number of young people who plan to work as manual laborers, farmers, or homemakers has sharply declined over the past 40 years.
Are today's young people too ambitious? Although the ambitions of a single adolescent may seem reasonable, the collective ambitions of this generation are undoubtedly too high. The number of adolescents who hope to become lawyers or judges is five times the number of projected job openings for the foreseeable future; the number who want to become writers, artists, entertainers, or athletes is 14 times the number of anticipated openings. There will be jobs, but primarily in fields that adolescents are not interested in pursuing, such as five times as many administrative and clerical jobs as there are adolescents who want to fill them. The picture is also skewed for service jobs, with seven times more jobs than intended applicants.
It seems painfully obvious that many teenagers will not realize their occupational ambitions. When faced with the realities of the labor market, many may give up their dreams, some at great psychological and financial costs. A few students will fulfill their dreams; others will develop realistic alternatives. Because life plans inevitably change, young people need realistic strategies that involve choice and evaluation.
Developing Aligned Ambitions
One problem facing most adolescents is their lack of basic information about how much education different occupations require, which makes it difficult for them to construct realistic plans. Teenagers whose educational expectations are consistent with their occupational aspirations have aligned their ambitions with reality; they know what type of job they want and how much education it will require.
Aligned ambitions reflect adolescents' knowledge of the world of work and of the educational pathways to different occupations. Such knowledge allows them to sustain higher levels of motivation and to make strategic choices about how to use their time and invest their efforts. Almost all students can name occupations that they would like to pursue, but during their high school years, many are likely to change their aspirations.
It is not the consistency of occupational choice that helps adolescents manage their lives, however, but rather the knowledge of the educational pathways to their desired occupations. Planning for the future is a strategic process that requires both the organizational skills and the willingness to commit to a course of action to achieve specific goals.
By developing clear plans, students with realistic ambitions are able to orchestrate a set of actions to achieve their goals. Visualizing a desired outcome and a pathway serves as a personal standard to guide and regulate actions, mobilize personal resources, and sustain high levels of effort. A coherent life plan can help adolescents bring a sense of order to their social world, focus their efforts, and highlight the consequences of making particular choices. Young people need help in developing coherent life plans, and schools and families can provide that support.
High Schools Can Help
In high school, students begin to make choices; they decide what kind of mathematics and science courses to study or whether to put forth their maximum effort or to "get by" with a minimum. These choices have significant consequences for their lives in high school as well as afterward. Their choices influence what they learn, what skills they acquire, and what qualifications they bring to a college or job application.
In examining the data from 13 schools collected in the Alfred P. Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development, we were able to demonstrate how high schools can influence the formation of ambitions. Maple Wood High School, a large, ethnically diverse, comprehensive school, had a high percentage of students who had aligned their ambitions with their class selections. Several factors seem to account for this situation.
At Maple Wood, helping students plan their high school careers is central to the school's mission. The school encourages teenagers to take responsibility for managing their high school careers through their curricular choices. School personnel make students aware of the necessary skills and the course prerequisites for advanced-level courses.
Administrators, teachers, and counselors concur that Maple Wood places a strong emphasis on academic subjects. One counselor explained that many students take four years of English although only three are required and that the "the vast majority of students take three to four years of math, even though the graduation requirement is only two." The curricular-planning process at Maple Wood, in which the student, the student's parents, and the student's counselor (or dean) participate, involves thinking long term.
Parents are expected to participate in the course-selection process and are invited to come in every winter for an individual appointment to plan their teenager's curriculum for the next year. The emphasis on parents' active involvement in their adolescent's course selections is not rhetorical. Students at Maple Wood consistently reported spending more time discussing school course selections and school experiences with their parents than did students in the other surveyed schools.
The key player in planning the curriculum is the dean. Deans are full-time counselors, with a caseload of 225 students whom they counsel for four years. The dean focuses on the "whole child." The school maintains the philosophy that everything that happens for a student in the course of his or her four years happens through the dean, who is responsible for academic counseling, scheduling, and ensuring that the student meets the requirements for the type of college that he or she expects to attend. Part of the dean's job is learning from the students about their goals and then getting them on the right course. As one dean told us, We use a four-year plan. We sit down with freshmen and say, "Let's try to think about a four-year plan. It's not engraved in stone. It can change at a whim. But let's try to do that." And it works, giving many students direction and focus.
A goal at Maple Wood is to match adolescents' interests and abilities with the proper courses. The deans encourage their advisees, early in their high school careers, to consider what they would like to do after high school. This encouragement usually becomes more formalized at the end of the sophomore year when most students have completed mandatory courses. The guidance that deans give is not prescriptive but is instead oriented toward helping students make decisions that do not lock them into specific areas of study or occupations: We no longer talk a lot with students about what they are going to major in, because it's going to change. It's going to change a couple of times. So we instead talk about the kinds of skills that we think are going to be important.
Counselors are sensitive to the sequential organization of mathematics and science. Certain course sequences provide better preparation than others for gaining admission to highly competitive colleges and universities. Deans encourage students to take courses that will maximize their opportunities to take advanced classes later or that will provide the widest range of options after high school. It is the counselors' responsibility to help students develop a plan. This emphasis on planfulness encourages adolescents to become responsible for their education, their decisions, and their commitments.
One student at Maple Wood expressed little desire to become a high school teacher like his father. Instead, he became interested in mechanical engineering during his junior year and articulated two reasons for his decision. The first was the field itself: I think there is a certain way of thinking. Like in math you have to think in a logical step pattern. There is a definite right or wrong answer. The second reason was the "recommendation of the dean," who told him about a career that matched his future plans "to do something with math and make a lot of money." Working with the dean, the student planned his next year, choosing courses to prepare for studying mechanical engineering in college, getting extra help from the tutoring center to improve his mathematical skills, and selecting colleges that offered programs in his field of interest.
Families and Ambitions
As children grow older, they tend to spend less time with their parents and more with their friends. But even with this limited time, parents can help their children organize and manage their lives around educational and occupational opportunities. Young people whose studies are aligned with their ambitions are more likely to have parents who help them become strategic planners. These parents are better informed about their adolescents' schooling experiences and future plans, use personal and social resources to help their teen in reaching his or her goals, and are willing to allocate financial resources to that end.
Parents should know what their adolescents are studying in school. They can talk about the prerequisites for high school courses and encourage their young teenagers to take appropriate middle school courses. In high school, parents need to continue to discuss which courses to select and whether these courses will prepare them for admission to their college of choice. Parents also need to learn their teenagers' social and intellectual strengths and weaknesses and, when necessary, help them seek out appropriate assistance.
Parents should be aware of the types of activities that their adolescents are involved in as well as how they spend time when they are alone. Teenagers are frequently alone, which can be psychologically stressful. Although solitary time can be productive, teenagers often need help in learning how to use it constructively: doing homework; reading; practicing a musical instrument; or pursuing a hobby, such as making mixed musical tapes or designing Web sites.
If adolescents want to work, parents can talk with them about what they like to do and the kind of work they might be interested in. Parents can help them understand the world of adult work by introducing them to people with jobs in their field of interest and pointing out internships in adult work settings or school programs. Parents should not assume that typical teenage work experiences provide knowledge and skills that are transferable to other work settings.
Helping adolescents requires expending resources. The likelihood that an adolescent will start college at a four-year institution is directly influenced by the parents' willingness to help pay for schooling. This fact affects a student's future because students who begin at four-year institutions are more likely to obtain a bachelor's degree than students who begin at two-year institutions with the same expectation.
Other forms of financial support can also benefit adolescents' knowledge and skills development during high school. These include engaging academic tutors, supporting unpaid internships, and assisting with college applications—a time-consuming, burdensome, and costly process.
A Final Word on Alignment
Aligned ambitions help adolescents create coherent life plans. They do not, however, lead teenagers in lockstep toward a specific occupation. Students may change their occupational interests over time. This is not surprising because during adolescence, young people try out different roles and discover their own talents and abilities.
Aligning ambitions with a course of study does have benefits, however, even if adolescents change their occupational interests. One advantage is helping adolescents make meaningful choices. Teenagers make many choices, some of which lack permanence: friends change, tastes change, interests change. Young people who have thought carefully about future opportunities in the job market and about the courses that will prepare them are more strategic in their decision making and thus are able to better and more meaningfully chart their life plans.
