Now, the depressing part: Many of the kids who, like Bob, had seemed destined for a four-year college and a well-paid job a few years ago had veered off track. They weren’t using drugs or on the streets, and they were employed, but they were often making minimum wage in jobs with little room for advancement. Some kids went to for-profit universities and didn’t get degrees. Others wanted to get out of their parents’ house so badly that they took whatever job they could, before they had the chance to get the education or training to excel further.

“All of this promise gets cut off at the knees, which it doesn’t have to,” Stefanie DeLuca, one of the authors, told me.

Even kids with identity projects can struggle. It’s what researchers call the “crabs in the bucket” phenomenon, where the difficulties of environment can drag down promising students. Students whose parents are absent, who are living in overcrowded homes, who are surrounded by crime and blight, often struggled in adolescence despite early promise and despite being passionate about their hobbies.

“Even for these kids who seem to have separated themselves from the most disadvantaged, there are parts of their environment that are weighing them down,” DeLuca told me.

When researchers talked to Bob’s mother in 2004, for example, she was already planning for him to go to college, telling them she was going to do “whatever I gotta do to get him there.” But then, when Bob was a freshman in high school, his mother and stepfather­—who had served as a father figure to Bob—got divorced. Bob started to unravel. His mother had to support the family on her own, and fell into a deep depression, eventually turning to drugs. Bob’s grades got so bad so suddenly that he was expelled from the prestigious magnet school he’d worked so hard to get into. He was transferred to a worse school, one with arrests and fights, police officers and suspensions. His passions—anime and cards—sustained him, but the resources to help him take SATs and ACTs and apply to colleges were barely present in his new school. He had to nag the guidance counselor for help and never heard back from any of the colleges he applied to.

When he graduated from high school with honors, he immediately started looking for jobs, thinking maybe some day, when he had the money, he’d go to college. As his family’s home got more crowded, he felt that he needed to get out. As he moved out on his own, still working minimum-wage jobs, college began to seem further and further out of reach.

Bob’s experience suggests that adolescence is a hard time for everyone, but for kids reared in low-income families, it’s a make-or-break time when a few tough situations can send life on a downward trajectory.

Many of the youth were so ready to get out of difficult living situations and bad neighborhoods that they jumped at the first opportunity that came to them, even if it wasn’t going to lead them far. Rather than attending four-year colleges, which might have given them the opportunity to try a few different types of fields, they felt compelled to do something quickly so they could begin to provide for themselves. Once they started trade schools and community colleges in one discipline, it was difficult to use those credits to study something else. Often, students would end up at a vocational school because they’d heard a friend went there and liked it, but found it didn’t suit them.