Young people taking longer to leave home and find work and a partner

Over the last two decades, the transition to adulthood has undergone significant change in many industrialised countries. The change is characterised by a general delay in the occurrence of major life events that mark the transition to adulthood, including delays in leaving the parental home and full-time education, entering the labour market, as well as delays in partnership formation. The order these events happen in has also been de-standardised.

A number of social, economic and cultural shifts contributed to this change, including the expansion of higher education, the privatisation of higher education costs, high youth unemployment rates, the greater instability and casualisation of the youth labour market, and the rise in housing costs. Cultural shifts have also been linked to changing patterns of family formation. The sustained austerity and welfare retrenchment since the 2008 financial crisis shifted youth policy towards a model in which many government policies come with a built-in expectation that parents should support children who are unemployed or on a low wage.

This study

I used data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and Understanding Society to follow cohorts of children of BHPS and Understanding Society participants who turned 16 over successive waves. I used these to construct a monthly dataset of the life events that mark their transition to adulthood. This allowed me to investigate how transition to adulthood trajectories have changed for successive cohorts of children in the UK. I did separate analysis for men and women, and by socio-economic background, given the evidence that transition to adulthood is strongly socially stratified along these lines.

The overall aim of the work is to enhance the understanding of how young people’s opportunities to make a transition into adulthood are shaped by social and economic conditions, and how this has changed over time.

The event history dataset

I created a complete history of events mapping four domains of life that mark the transition to adulthood for all BHPS and Understanding Society sample members who have turned 16 during the surveys’ lifetimes. The sample consists of 10,789 people.

Following these children over time, I compiled information about their educational, labour market, and marital/partnership history, as well as their movements in and out of the parental home from age 16 onwards. The dataset also contains variables capturing children’s socio-economic background.

Findings

Previous research has shown that the transition to adulthood in the UK has considerably extended and became more de-standardised. The evidence from my event history dataset suggests this trend extended in later born cohorts: leaving full-time education, moving out of parental home, first partnership and entry into the labour market are taking longer to happen. For all the events considered, the findings also indicate that although there is a strong social gradient in the timing of these events, this became weaker for later cohorts of young adults.

Using sequence analysis, I identified six trajectories:

• The first (29% of the sample) is characterised by extended education followed by fast transitions to employment, independent living, and union formation.
• The second (18% of the sample) is also characterised by fast employment transitions after extended education, but later transitions to independent living and union formation.
• All the remaining clusters are characterised by leaving education at an earlier age. The third, fifth and sixth, which represent 14%, 13% and 17% of the sample respectively, are all characterised by fast employment transitions.
• Cluster three is characterised by fast transitions to independent living and union formation.
• In cluster five and especially cluster six, transitions to these states occur much later.
• The fourth cluster (9%) is the one experiencing the most problematic transitions with extended periods of inactivity and unemployment.

Over time, there has been a substantial rise in the proportion of both young men and women in the two clusters that involve extended education. For men, this was accompanied by a decrease in the proportion leaving full-time education early and making early transitions into employment.

However, across successive cohorts, the majority of men who left full-time education at an early age, despite making an early transition into employment, are starting to live independently and form unions later.

Among women who make early employment transitions, an increased polarisation emerges between those who make an early transition and those who make a late transition to independent living.

The pattern of problematic trajectories is U-shaped: increasing for both men and women in the 1981-86 and the 1987-92 cohorts, and decreasing for the youngest 1993-1995 cohort, especially among women – a pattern which likely reflects cyclical changes in employment rates. Moreover, it is worth noting that the decrease in the proportion of young adults following problematic trajectories largely reflects the substantial increase in the proportion of them being in education longer. Looking within the group of young adults who left full-time education at an early age, an increasingly larger proportion in each cohort follow problematic trajectories.

Class gradient

Unsurprisingly, the findings indicate that the transition to adulthood is characterised by a strong class gradient. Respondents from higher-class backgrounds are two to three times more likely to follow trajectories that involve extended education, and two to three times less likely to belong to clusters that involve leaving full-time education at an earlier age and making fast transitions to employment.

The social class gradient in problematic trajectories is even stronger. These are the ones characterised by extended periods of inactivity and unemployment. Young adults from the least advantaged class backgrounds are over 10 times more likely to follow problematic trajectories compared to respondents from more advantaged social class backgrounds.

For women, the social class gradient has narrowed for all transitions to adulthood among more recent cohorts, whereas for men the class gradient has narrowed for the trajectories that involve extended education and those that involve leaving education – but widened for the transitions involving problematic trajectories.

I’ve produced a user guide to the event histories dataset, so other researchers can use it to analyse trajectories and inequalities as they evolve through the life course.

Read the working paper

Authors

EmploymentFindings and impactSocial mobilityYoung people