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Everyone in the class of 2009 knows someone with a story like that

These are depressing statistics, if unsurprising ones; I graduated college in 2009, and they ring true to what my Facebook news feed showed a few years ago. But they don't prove that colleges failed us. We graduated into the worst part of a deep recession. At the same time, the definition of adulthood was changing to depend less on acquiring a spouse, house, career, and kids. Many members of the class of 2009 didn't follow Beth's path right away — but that might not be a bad thing in the long run.

But Beth is rare. Almost three-quarters of the students the authors surveyed got some kind of financial support from their parents, in most cases less than $5,000 per year. Just over half of the graduates they studied were unemployed, employed part-time, or making less than $30,000 per year.

Beth went to a mid-tier public university and studied more than 20 hours per week, significantly boosting her critical thinking abilities. She majored in a health-related field and earned a graduate degree. After a few months living at home and more than 50 job applications, Beth found work in her field. She got married two years after graduation, and she and her husband are financially independent.

For Arum and Roksa, the poster child for successful adulthood is Beth — and colleges should be trying to reproduce her success.

The people Arum and Roksa interviewed sounded like my high school and college classmates. A business major who partied his way to a 3.9 GPA, then ended up working a delivery job he found on Craigslist, sounded familiar; so did a public health major who was living at home two years after graduation, planning to go to nursing school. Everyone in the class of 2009 knows someone with a story like that.

These graduates flailed after college because they didn't learn much while they were in it, the authors argue. About a third of students in their study made virtually no improvement on a test of critical thinking and reasoning over four years of college. Aspiring Adults Adrift argues that this hurt them in the job market. Students with higher critical thinking scores were less likely to be unemployed, less likely to end up in unskilled jobs, and less likely to lose their jobs once they had them.

That could indicate that there's a relationship between critical thinking ability and career success, and that colleges are failing students by not developing those abilities.

"Students that advance in college in terms of their general skills, critical thinking and complex reasoning do better in their labor market outcomes," Arum said in a recent interview.

But there's also a simpler explanation: the same qualities that help students acquire critical thinking abilities also make them good employees. A student who skips the Thursday night party scene for an early Friday class probably won't give up after more than 50 rejections for jobs in her field. A student who takes hard classes, even when her major doesn't require them, is also likely to work hard on the job.

For the class of 2009, the explanation for our struggles seems simpler than whether or not we wrote enough 20-page research papers. We graduated into historically terrible economic times. The class of 2008, which had a few months after graduation before the worst of the recession hit, is still suffering the effects five years later.

Roksa argues that the recession doesn't explain recent graduates' woes. "Unemployment, arguably, yes, there's probably an increase in unemployment relative to other time periods," she said. "But if you look at almost all of the other trends" — such as young adults who are living with their parents or dependent on them for financial assistance — "they've been changing for a very long time."

Blaming colleges for what happened to recession-era graduates is like blaming umbrella manufacturers when you get wet in a hurricane

But the recession dramatically accelerated those trends. The percentage of young adults living with their parents grew just 1 percent between 1981 and 2007. Many housing analysts expect young adults will move out as the economy improves, suggesting their motivation was primarily economic.

Blaming colleges for what happened to recession-era graduates is like blaming umbrella manufacturers when you get wet in a hurricane. Colleges share some blame; my "adrift" classmates needed better counseling on majors and more help as they searched for jobs in an economy with few to offer. And the argument that colleges focus too much on the experiences they provide and too little on the education students receive is persuasive, and worrisome.

But in the end, in 2009, we were all drowning in a storm that was beyond colleges' ability to control.

Roksa and Arum aren't really arguing for a more academically rigorous college education. They did that in their last book. They're fighting the broader idea of emerging adulthood — that the first half of your 20s is a time to prolong adolescence and delay adult responsibilities.

They find a few recent graduates worthy of their approval. Besides Beth, there is Julie, who graduated from a highly selective college, shares a house with her boyfriend, gets her news from the New York Times and National Public Radio, and votes in local elections; she also rents out an extra bedroom, which the authors describe not as a juvenile decision to live with roommates but as a prudent financial move. And they praise Michael, who within two years of graduation had earned a master's degree in engineering, married the girlfriend he met the first semester of freshman year, and started thinking about buying a house.

These are some impressive 24-year-olds. But reading about Julie, Beth, and Michael feels like being hectored by a well-meaning relative who wants to know why you can't be like your more responsible cousins. Arum and Roksa set parameters for a successful life that feel awfully narrow.

The class of 2009 might be optimistic, against all odds, because we imagine adulthood differently. The researchers are diving into a deep generation gap: "Emerging adults are trying to think about success in a slightly different way," Roksa said. "There's much more of an idea that being an adult has to do with how you feel, with taking responsibility, finding fulfillment, enjoying the journey, not just focusing on the destination."

Is a more flexible definition of adulthood such a bad thing? The authors say that it is. They're alarmed that 32 percent of the college graduates they surveyed don't read newspapers online more than once a month, and that 40 percent rarely talk about current events. They worry that the graduates lack a sense of purpose. And they argue that first jobs really do matter: a stint in menial work could hold you back in the long run.

The class of 2009 has had no other choice than to redefine success.

The struggles are widespread, but that doesn't mean they aren't serious. "They look around, most of their peers aren't doing particularly well, so you figure that you're going to be OK," Roksa said. "Because all of you are struggling, and you have a college degree, so good things will happen to everybody."

But the class of 2009 has had no other choice than to redefine success. We headed to college in an economic boom, confident that we were special and we would succeed. Four years later, we graduated into the worst recession since the Great Depression. No wonder that two years after graduation we were reconsidering our sense of purpose: Our expectations had been wrong. Our hopes were dashed. We had played by the rules, and it hadn't worked.

We could have accepted that, by traditional standards, we were failing utterly to grow up. We could have let go of hope that things would ever get better.

Or we could ask why the old definition of adulthood was so great anyway, and continue to have faith that our lives would be better than our parents' — even if we follow a different path to end up there.