Not Quite Adults. Author Interview on PurpleCar Park Dr. Richard Settersten pulls in to PurpleCar Park to discuss his new book (along with writer Barbara Ray): Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing A Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone. Dr. Settersten holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University. He is currently on the Faculty of Oregon State University, where he holds the chair of the Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families. Also pulling in to PurpleCar Park we have a young entrepreneur, David Spinks. Mr. Spinks is a founder Blogdash.com, a service that focuses on blogger outreach. Along with other projects like Scribnia.com and his own personal blog whatspinksthinks.com, David is a founder and host of the Under 30 Professionals group. The #u30pro chat on Twitter on Thursday nights is a vibrant conversation for Millennials by Millennials on topics that effect their lives. Stop what you’re doing, pull the car over and listen in to Rick and David talk about young people, jobs, finances, cohabitation, class struggles, living at home, marriage and family, college, graduate school and more. Full transcript available, in pdf form below. For those of you interested in listening to more on the subject of fulfilling jobs, why companies are stuck in the 1950’s models, meaningful careers and motivation, please check out the PurpleCar Park episode with Dan Pink, about his book DRiVE: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. You can find that episode on iTunes or click here. Buy the book: More reading: Colleges That Profit, Students Who Don’t: Philly Daily News Click to continue to download or see this episode’s transcript: setterstenandspinkspurplecarparktranscipt The entire transcript, pasted here in full: This is a transcript from Christine Cavalierʼs podcast called PurpleCar Park. In this episode of the podcast PurpleCar Park, Christine Cavalier interviews author Richard Settersten about his latest book with writer Barbara Ray, Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Taking A Slower Path to Adulthood and Why It’s Good for Everyone. Also interviewed in this podcast is David Spinks, founder of Blogdash.com and founder of the Under-30 Professionals group and the corresponding Twitter chat #u30pro. If you use any part of this transcript, please credit Christine Cavalier and www.purplecar.net. The APA Magazine style citation is as follows: Cavalier, C., M.Ed. (2011, March 23). PurpleCar Park Podcast by Christine Cavalier: Interview with Richard Settersten and David Spinks. PurpleCar Park: Interview with Richard Settersten and David Spinks, 1, [fill in which page you quoted from here]. Retrieved [fill in the date you found the transcript here] from the World Wide Web: http://www.purplecar.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/setterstenandspinkspurplecartranscript.pdf . (Music) Introduction (by The Matthew Show) It’s time to put on the brakes and pull into PurpleCar Park, your stop for book reviews, author interviews, and thoughts about the act of reading in our super-digital, data-driven world. Hosted by Miss PurpleCar herself, Christine Cavalier. CHRISTINE CAVALIER: Welcome Everybody. It’s Christine Cavalier, from PurpleCar Park. Today on our show we have Dr. Richard Settersten. Dr. Settersten holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University. Dr. Settersten is currently on the Faculty of Oregon State University, where he holds the chair of the Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families. He is the author, along with writer Barbara Ray, of Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone. Welcome, Dr. Settersten. RICHARD SETTERSTEN: Thanks, Christine. CHRISTINE CAVALIER: Also today we have a young entrepreneur, David Spinks. Mr. Spinks is a founder Blogdash.com, a service that focuses on blogger outreach. Along with other projects like Scribnia.com and his own personal blog whatspinksthinks.com, David is a founder and host of the Under 30 Professionals group. The #u30pro chat on Twitter on Thursday nights is a vibrant conversation for Millennials by Millennials on topics that effect their lives. Welcome Mr. Spinks. DAVID SPINKS: Thank you so much. CHRISTINE CAVALIER: Let’s explain very quickly what a Twitter chat is, David. DAVID SPINKS: Sure. A Twitter chat is just gathering sometimes it’s weekly, sometimes bi-weekly or monthly, ours is once every week, where people pretty much all gather on Twitter. They all follow one hashtag (#), in our case it’s #u30pro, and you pretty much just have a discussion. We ask questions on a specific topic each week. And everyone answers and discusses it. If you go to meetup.com/u30pro, there’s our meetup page everywhere there. So, you can sign up for whatever city you’re in and you know we’ll be doing a lot more in all different cities. CHRISTINE CAVALIER You welcome all professionals of all levels, I assume? DAVID SPINKS: Yeah, we encourage all professionals, young or older, or experienced or not experienced. The idea is to bring in and have a really good discussion, so it’s really valuable to have more experienced professionals in there to provide insight from their experience and to just give advice where applicable. And they get a lot of value out of it too, because they learn from young professionals about how often they like to jump from job to job, or how to apply for jobs. And they can just kind of give them an idea of what young professionals are doing today. CHRISTINE CAVALIER: Not Quite Adults by Richard Settersten and Barbara Ray. Why 20-Somethings Are Taking A Slower Path to Adulthood and Why It’s Good for Everyone. This book basically goes over a lot of research and a lot of anecdotal stories from people in the field. Is it mostly from surveys? RICHARD SETTERSTEN: That’s right. So, the MacArthur Foundation brought together, well, about a dozen of us from different fields, Sociology, Psychology, Economics, Public Policy, to take fresh look at what’s happening in the period of life between 18 and 34. In a way, they were so forward-thinking. There’ve been some big shake-ups in this period of life, especially when it comes to things that we normally think about as traditional markers of adulthood, like leaving home, finishing school, finding work, getting married, having kids. Right? Those are all kind of big sociological markers that matter a lot to the well-being of a society. So we analyzed about 2 dozen major national surveys, sometimes going back as long as a hundred years, if you look at the census, for example. And then we also draw on in-person interviews with about 500 young people, in 5 different sites across the US. And the in-person interviews, the anecdotes as you say, really help bring those stories to life. CHRISTINE CAVALIER: And what would you say is the general temperature out there for the 20-Somethings or the Millennials? RICHARD SETTERSTEN: Yeah, so you know, this is exactly why we wanted to write this book. There was so much that seemed socially relevant here, that we, you know, we wanted to take some of our messages to the streets, to kind of help young people, their parents, educators, policy makers, kind of all understand what’s going on and what to do about it. And one of the major factors for us was that, there’s so much negative conversation in the public about young people today. And yet, so much of our research evidence really runs counter to it! And so it was a major impetus to kind of, say, “Here’s an amazing amount of evidence that can really shatter so many of the assumptions that we’re quick to make about young people today.” CHRISTINE CAVALIER: Right. And you talk in the book about swimmers and treaders. What’s a swimmer and what’s a treader? RICHARD SETTERSTEN: The typical swimmer is a young person who’s got, say strong support of their parents. It’s not just about money, I mean, it is about money to some degree, but it is especially about guidance and emotional support, good sense of their futures, really strategic decisions that are a good match to their skills and abilities. And they got a good sense from how to get from here to there. In contrast to the swimmers, the treaders are, you know, probably not the kind of kids who, in an earlier era, would have gone to college. They’ve heard that college is “The Way”. They’re not sure where it’s all going, or what they want to do. Maybe they’re moving through lots of majors or switching institutions, or going from a four-year to community college. Often these are first-generation college students who, who might have support of parents, let’s say, but whose parents don’t really have the know-how about how to get into and make it through college. CHRISTINE CAVALIER: Right. RICHARD SETTERSTEN:
Those are kids who are treading hard, who say skipped college are working. I mean, very often these, the kids who are treading are in really low paying service work, that comes with no benefits, or that has really limited opportunities for moving up. They’re having trouble making ends meet, in getting through the days, letting alone having enough to raise a family on. Right? CHRISTINE CAVALIER: Right. RICHARD SETTERSTEN: These are the kinds of kids that we really want to turn attention to to figure out what we can do to improve of the routes they’re on. CHRISTINE CAVALIER: And David, how did your own education work out? DAVID SPINKS: Yeah, so, for me, college was always something I knew I was going to do. I definitely wasn’t raised in a wealthy family but we did OK. And my parents were definitely the types who were always extremely supportive, and wanted me to succeed and wanted me to go to college, get a good job and do well in my career. So I went to college right a
