As teenagers return to school this fall, a new report suggests that many of them are moving through adolescence without the experiences that help prepare them for adulthood, activities like a part-time job, a club, a team and a regular family meal.
The clearest evidence is teen employment, which alone has been declining for nearly 50 years.
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The report, “A Digital Divide in American Adolescence,” by Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, was published in mid-August. It draws on the results of the American Teenagers Survey, whose interviews were conducted in January and February with teens aged 13 to 17.
The study’s first key finding is that the bottom rung of the career ladder is disappearing. A generation ago, a summer job or an afterschool shift was a routine rite of passage. It was a place where teenagers learned to show up on time, take direction from someone who wasn’t a parent or teacher and get paid for reliability rather than talent. But today, only 15% of teens in the survey reported having a part-time job, and just 28% even among 16- and 17-year-olds — the group most likely to work. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show teen labor force participation peaked at nearly 58% in the late 1970s and has been falling ever since.
The survey also shows that even within adolescence itself, opportunities for growth become rarer as students age. Travel sports participation among boys falls from 52% in early adolescence to 35% by age 16 or 17; choir and band participation among girls falls from 30% to 17%; and only 7% of teens are in student government or debate.
None of these activities is glamorous. But they’re the low-stakes, repeatable settings where teenagers practice commitment, teamwork and how to lose gracefully. They’re the soft infrastructure that makes a first real job, internship or semester of college survivable rather than disorienting.
When that infrastructure thins out, an experience gap shows up later. Employers often say young workers lack basic job skills. The real problem is many never had the chance to practice them.
The AEI survey’s second finding is that this erosion isn’t evenly distributed. Teens with college-educated parents participate in extracurriculars at roughly double the rate of peers whose parents didn’t attend college. Nearly 1 in 4 are in an academic club, compared with 13% of teens whose parents didn’t attend college. And they’re three times as likely to be in student government or debate.
Screen time follows the same pattern in reverse. Teens spend, on average, close to three hours a day on social media. But neither is that time evenly distributed. Girls raised in households without a college-educated parent spend more time on more apps and are less likely to have tried cutting back than girls of parents with a degree. Boys in the same households log substantially more hours gaming.
Third, teens’ plans for what happens after high school are shifting, and shifting unevenly. Only 48% now plan to attend a four-year college, far short of being the near-default path for high school graduates. A separate study found the share of teens planning on any college — two- or four-year — fell from 73% in 2018 to 45% by 2024. The AEI survey reports 17% plan on a two-year or vocational program, 10% a full-time job and nearly 1 in 5 aren’t sure what’s next.
Those plans split sharply by gender and socioeconomic class, with 74% of girls with college-educated parents planning to attend a four-year school, versus 46% whose parents didn’t.
A separate survey released in late August 2026, Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation’s fourth annual “Voices of Gen Z” poll, makes essentially the same point from inside the school building. Its sample of 14- to 18-year-olds is close to the age range AEI surveyed, and its findings closely track AEI’s.
No more than 20% of students feel “very prepared” for any specific path after high school, college, trade school, an apprenticeship or the job they want. Even among students planning to attend college, only 19% feel very prepared to do so.
When adults talk with students about their futures, those conversations are overwhelmingly about one path, with 52% of students saying adults have talked to them a lot about going to college. That’s compared with 17% discussing apprenticeships and 14% talking about jobs that don’t require a degree. This gap holds even among students who’ve already said they don’t plan to go to college.
Put together, the two surveys describe the same experience gap from two directions. AEI shows that fewer informal, out-of-school experiences that build real-world readiness are happening. Gallup/Walton shows that inside school, the guidance students receive is aimed almost entirely at one route, regardless of which one they’re headed toward.
Neither survey is describing a generation that’s lost interest in a good future. But both paint a picture of a generation that’s been given a narrower set of tools to reach it than it needs.
Here’s what school leaders and policymakers can do.
- Treat work-based learning as core infrastructure, not as an elective add-on. States and districts should expand youth and paid internship pipelines that give students structured work experience during the school year.
- Protect and expand school-based extracurriculars. This is especially important for teenagers whose families can’t supply the equivalent privately. The disparity in sports and club participation is a resource gap schools can partly close by keeping programs funded and accessible.
- Focus on transportation and scheduling. The problem isn’t only motivation; much of the falloff in extracurricular participation among lower-income teens is logistical. Afterschool jobs and activities require rides and flexible hours many working families can’t provide.
- Use state Workforce Pell and career-navigation funding to reach younger teens. Don’t just focus on juniors and seniors, and extend information beyond college advising. Guidance concentrated almost entirely on college leaves the majority of teens who won’t take it with less support.
None of this calls for panic, but it does call for attention. The teenagers in these surveys aren’t disengaged or unhappy in any dramatic sense. Most report being satisfied with their lives, their friendships, even their relationships with their parents. What they’re missing is practice and preparation for adulthood.
The back-to-school season is usually treated as a fresh start for academics. This survey data suggests it’s worth treating it as a fresh start for something schools have quietly let slide: the ordinary, unglamorous work of learning how to show up, and helping every teenager, not just those who are college-bound, see a clear path toward what comes next.