This is an interesting point and one that has sort of "clicked into place" for me recently. I built a car from scratch, as I've mentioned. I built it at my granparents' house. They were old school - Okies blown out of their cattle ranches by the Dust Bowl who moved to Los Alamos after the war, neither of them having finished 8th grade. But that's the thing - most people didn't finish 8th grade back then. My grandmother castigated me once for showing up after 10am on a Friday, starting in with "when I was your age…" (picture it in the deepest okie drawl you can imagine, from a short woman in her 80s). My grandfather said (same basic drawl) "leave him alone! When you were his age you had two kids!" I'm reading this book at the moment. He spends a lot of time talking about the rise of education and prosperity in the 50s and 60s of Europe. One point he makes is that up until education reforms of the 60s, nobody went to college. Compulsory schooling in Italy went from age 12 to age 14; in Germany it went from 12 to 16. That's a bunch of kids that normally would be working in shops and starting up families who were in school all of a sudden. Combine that with a rise in incomes and suddenly you have teenagers, which Mr. Judt emphasizes were something new under the sun. So really - when we talk about "the prolonged adolescence of teenagers" we need to understand that we only really have three generations of teenagers to compare with: Boomers, Boomers' kids, Boomers grandkids. Here, check this out: - If you were 15 in 1930, you were working and done with school forever, unless you were a total egghead (Ph.D class these days). - If you were 15 in 1940, you weren't looking at college, you were looking at military service. - If you were 15 in 1950, you were going to finish high school for damn sure and maybe go on to college. - If you were 15 in 1960, your choices were about to be college or Vietnam. - If you were 15 in 1970, it was college and maybe grad school. - If you were 15 in 1980, not going to college was a let down and grad school was normal. - If you were 15 in 1990, not going to college was officially deviant and chances were good you'd need a grad degree to accomplish anything. - If you were 15 in 2000, you knew your employment prospects were shit unless you had an advanced degree. - If you were 15 in 2010, you know that not only are you going to need an advanced degree, you're going to have to put in a couple years of unpaid internship in order to even make your money back. "Prolonged adolescence?" More like "prolonged dependence." A middle-class kid in 1930 could start a life as soon as he was done with school - was expected to, in fact. A middle-class kid in 2014 is looking at real unemployment for his age group of pushing 27%, exorbitant prices for a degree that guarantees him nothing, a high school diploma that barely counts for anything, a military engaged in endless war for as long as he can remember, and a peerage system that basically requires him to apprentice to his trade after blowing five or six figures spending five years learning nothing even vaguely applicable to his future life. Much like the retreat to the internet, I think a "prolonged adolescence" is a wholly rational response to a wholly irrational situation. I've said before - for the cost of what a 4-year private degree for my daughter is projected to cost, I'll buy her a couple Starbuck's franchises and call it a day. Friend of mine has a girlfriend. She's a dermatologist. One of her colleagues did a breakdown of the cost of a medical degree and the salary of a specialist after completing residency… vs. the cost of buying a Fedex Home Delivery truck. Fedex has the edge for over 20 years. There you go. Prolonged adolescence. Maybe the plumbers have the right idea...What do you think though, about this "prolonged adolescence" that some are worried about? In some ways, I think that if people are living longer and expected to stay in school longer, that the desire for a prolonged adolescence makes sense from the point of view of a college kid who is experiencing freedom for the first time in their lives.