There is no shortage of trend pieces floating around the Internet about how millennials work, save, eat, shop or live in their parents’ basements.

But let’s be real: most of those stories are focused on a group of often white, largely middle-class (or wealthier) 20- and 30-somethings who graduated from four-year colleges and work in white-collar settings.

A trio of sociologists are looking to broaden the conversation about this oft-talked about demographic. Stefanie DeLuca and Kathryn Edin, professors at Johns Hopkins University, along with Susan Clampet-Lundquist, a professor at St. Joseph’s University, have written a book that draws from 10 years of field research on 150 black Baltimore residents born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book, called “Coming of Age in the Other America,” is focused largely on the wave of interviews researchers conducted with participants in 2010, when they were between ages 15 and 24.

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All of the participants spent at least some of their childhood in Baltimore public housing, but many managed to move to neighborhoods with less-concentrated poverty, thanks to various policy initiatives. While many still struggled to find jobs that paid well and gain access to higher education, they all largely made it farther education-wise than their parents, thanks in part to their new surroundings, the researchers found.

Roughly a year after the unrest in Baltimore surrounding the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who was injured in police custody and later died, the authors hope the book and its subjects provide a counternarrative to the way young people of color living in cities are often portrayed in the media.

MarketWatch spoke with two of the authors. An edited and condensed version of the conversation is below:

MarketWatch: Why is a study and book like this necessary?

Stephanie DeLuca: We viewed the literature as lacking in coverage of disadvantaged youth of color. A lot of the research on transition to adulthood was focusing on white, middle-class students and so we wanted to explore that as well and see what the fortunes of a cohort of young men and women would be like in Baltimore at the brink of adulthood.

MW: What were the findings that stood out the most to you?

Susan Clampet-Lundquist: One of the things that really struck us is that in the midst of disadvantage probably about half of our group of young people had created something that we called an identity project that acted as a life raft to get them through the disadvantage that they might face in their neighborhood or family or school. [These are passion projects that included interests as varied as writing poetry and customizing cars.] And so this identity project was something that they created either on their own or within peer groups or maybe within an institution. And it was something that gave them meaning and it was also something that came along with some concrete activity.

That’s the positive side, but the other side is that as sociologists we also look at what’s going on with the individual and their larger context. And so this identity project is not enough. It’s not enough to have something that gives you meaning that kind of pushes you forward because you’re still operating in a context of disadvantage and that can really pull you down in a number of different ways.

SD: We were struck also by how few of the young people in our study ended up turning to the street. If we think about the backdrop of last April [the unrest following Gray’s death], the images of Baltimore that people saw on TV really perpetuated a long standing stereotype about young people in a city being involved in the street, selling drugs, hustling, dropping out of school. What we found is for the 150 young people that we followed, less than 18% ended up turning to the street for any amount of time and most of them didn’t persist.

A lot of what we talk about in the book provides this corrective narrative or at least a balancing of the common perception that the only kinds of young people that exist in these neighborhoods are kids who aren’t about anything. At least half of them were squarely about something and were searching and hungry for a way to find meaning because it was so powerful in helping them survive a lot of the trauma and disadvantage of where they were coming from.

MW: What were they doing instead?

SD: What we saw most of these young people doing at the brink of adulthood was going to school, working, combining the two. The majority of these youth were engaged in mainstream institutions like school or work and this was particularly the case for those with identity projects.

Most of these youth were doing what they thought they were supposed to do, what we would encourage them to do.

SCL: One of the things that we found that we can do better is helping those students that are wanting to pursue postsecondary education. Many of them get stuck in these traps. Either in for-profit trade schools, where they make it very easy to sign up for loans, but often times students don’t complete the certificate or even if they do they find that it’s not worth very much in the labor market. Or in community college, where you have to take a bunch of remedial classes because your high school foundation was not great, but those remedial classes don’t count for your college credit, so it gets very discouraging.

MW: How can people avoid getting stuck in those traps?

SCL: Some of it can start in middle school or high school. There were a handful of youth who had been helped out through some type of program. [In some cases formal programs through school in other cases informal mentorships with coaches or other adults in their lives.] Sometimes the students were involved in a college access program that started in high school and it stayed with them while they were in college, which was very helpful for when they were at their four-year college and things started coming up, whether it was financial things or things going on at home, and this person was able to be their cheerleader and help them stay in college.

SD: We also think about the bigger picture of disadvantage in urban space. The geography of opportunity that was stacked against these youth and their families to begin with, but also over time. Another way to think about this is how do we provide housing opportunities for families to access our most opportunity-rich community with the best schools? Or alternatively, how do we prop up urban neighborhoods so they’re already places that provide opportunity as opposed to putting kids in harm’s way?

MW: How are the coming of age stories of this group different or similar to the middle-class 20-somethings we often hear about?

SCL: There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in the media about these young adults who are living with their parents after they graduate from college and it’s kind of taking them longer perhaps to launch into independent adulthood. With our youth we found what we would call expedited adulthood where youth feel an urgency to establish independence.

Some factors that contribute to (that urgency) are financial issues. Some of the youth were living in overcrowded situations because we know that affordable housing is becoming scarce. We’ve got some youth who are living in overcrowded housing situations so they want to be able to be independent, to be working full time in order to be out on their own and get out of the crowded situations.

Another factor that contributes to their urgency to become full-fledged adults, is even though they’re living in less-poor neighborhoods, they’re still living in neighborhoods that have levels of violent crime that are quite different than your average neighborhood and so they have been exposed to a lot of death around them, a lot of early death, which makes them feel they have shortened time span to get things done.

Some of our youth feel like they want to be able to get an instant career so perhaps (they think) “I don’t have time to finish a four-year degree”. First of all, it may not be financially likely to be able to do that, but (they may feel they) don’t have time to do it either because (they) need to be out earning money, establishing an independent household.

SD: This urgency, which is typical of young adults, wanting to be on their own, this desire to get out and have your own place or start your career, leads these aspiring and motivated youth to jump at the chance to attend, say a for-profit trade school, because it looks like they can get a career started in less than 18 months. The commercials for these places are quite effective in promising a concrete-looking job in a short period of time.

They’re left vulnerable, in their motivation and excitement, to be prey to these at worst, predatory institutions, or at best, expensive ones, that don’t allow them to transfer credits. For those who don’t end up taking a postsecondary path, they enter a low-wage, entry-level labor market that’s exploitative and that doesn’t promise even part-time work, let alone a job with benefits. And they often say these jobs aren’t what I want to be doing.

One outcome that almost all of these young adults want to avoid is doing nothing or being about nothing. They take what they can get and they do the best they can with it, but what we see is that these for-profit schools rarely deliver on the employment and earnings that they promise and that these jobs almost never turn into the kind of careers where our young people can raise families and can live even in a two-bedroom apartment in most metro areas.