Becoming an adult

This part follows young people from school through college to adult income and the mental health of young adults, and its evidence comes in several kinds with different populations and timelines. One kind describes institutions as they stood recently, in the earnings, prices and locations of colleges. The other describes children born in 1978 to 1983, whose adult outcomes the Opportunity Atlas estimates for the tracts where they grew up. Another describes young adults interviewed in a yearly survey. The kinds complement each other, and no record follows a child from a classroom to an adult outcome. Where the Atlas allows, the chapters compare groups of children inside the same tract, which removes the differences between neighborhoods that a county or ZIP code average mixes in.

Chapter 4.1, College access, price and earnings takes the institution as the unit for earnings and price and the county as the unit for distance. A decade after entry, former students who received federal aid earned less at the median for-profit college than at the median public college, and residents of more deprived counties live farther from the nearest four-year college. The earnings describe aided students who entered in 2009 and 2010, and a pattern across colleges is not a statement about what a college does for a student.

Chapter 4.2, Teen births finds that the Atlas's predicted share of women with a teen birth is higher in tracts that are more deprived today, a generation after the births, and that inside the same tract Black women's predicted share exceeds white women's by a gap that shows no detectable change across levels of deprivation. The births fell in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the measure is not a current teen birth rate.

Chapter 4.3, Race, income and mobility holds the tract fixed and finds that, averaged over the tracts where the Atlas estimates both groups, white children from low-income families reached a higher adult income rank in their thirties than Black children from low-income families raised in the same tract. Families at one income level can still differ in wealth, schooling and how institutions treat them, so the gap is one the data describe without explaining.

Chapter 4.4, Boys and mobility (planned) will ask whether boys and girls raised in the same neighborhoods reach different incomes as adults, and where that gap is widest.

Chapter 4.5, Mental distress in young adults uses a different survey, with weights, to follow frequent mental distress by age group from 2014. The rate among the youngest adults rose to 2022 and had fallen by 2024. The survey draws a new sample each year, so the youngest adults of one year are not the people interviewed earlier at a younger age, and it places respondents by state and nothing finer.