Population Research Discovery Seminars
The Journey into Adulthood in Uncertain Times
Robert Crosnoe, Rapoport Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts, Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin
Parrington Hall Room 360
To Join By Zoom: Register HERE
Follow this link to sign up for a 1:1 meeting with Dr. Crosnoe during their visit on February 27th
02/27/2026
12:30-1:30 PM PT
360 Parrington Hall
Co-Sponsor(s):
This presentation will provide an overview of a new book, The Journey into Adulthood in Uncertain Times, co-authored with Shannon Cavanagh and published in 2025 by Russell Sage. It tackles some key questions of interests to population scientists, developmental scientists, and the public, including: Is the lengthening span of time that young people in the U.S. take to transition into adult roles creating a new generation of “adultolescents”? How has the decades-long reshaping of this critical period of life been complicated by specific historical crises? The answers to these questions come from What does this interplay between long-term trends and short-term shocks mean for the cycle of inequality across American generations? The answers come from integrated analyses of multiple sources of population and qualitative data that consider how: 1) key aspects of socioeconomic attainment, family-building, and socioemotional development among young adults (aged 18-26) have evolved since the early 1970s with a particular focus on the potential disruption of the Great Recession of the 2000s; 2) young adults in recent cohorts since the 1990s have taken trajectories though these three domains as they moved from their late teens through the mid-twenties; 3) how young adults have made sense of and gained meaning from the ups and downs of coming of age during the modern era; and 4) how young adults’ pathways through this stage of life emerged from the families and communities in which they were born and grew up over many years. The resulting story is about gradual versus revolutionary change in the ways that young people become adults, one that grounds the growing social panic about young adults today in a more complicated but less alarming reality.
Robert Crosnoe is the Rapoport Centennial Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also is a faculty member in the Population Research Center and Department of Psychology and formerly served as Senior Associate Dean of Liberal Arts and Chair of Sociology. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Crosnoe’s mixed methods research explores the education, health, and social development of children, adolescents, and young adults and how they are stratified by their families’ socioeconomic circumstances and migration histories. This work has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Institute of Education Sciences, National Institute of Justice, William T. Grant Foundation, and Foundation for Child Development. A few of his book titles are Mexican Roots, American Schools: Helping Mexican Immigrant Children Succeed (Stanford University Press), Fitting In, Standing Out: Navigating the Social Challenges of High School to Get an Education (Cambridge University Press), Debating Early Child Care: The Relationship between Developmental Science and the Media (Cambridge University Press with Tama Leventhal), and Families Now: Diversity, Demography, and Development (Macmillan). Dr. Crosnoe has been or is President of the Society for Research on Adolescence, Chair of multiple sections of the American Sociological Association, Deputy Editor of Journal of Marriage and Family and Demography, Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Population Reference Bureau, and a member of the AP Higher Education Advisory Council for the College Board.