Understanding "The First Year Out"...and beyond

I've been reading an excellent book called "The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School", a sociological study of teenagers in their first year after High School graduation. In the book author Tim Clydesdale shares a number of interesting insights about young adults that are helpful for those in ministry, higher education, and related fields.

In particular Clydesdale challenges the idealistic belief of many in Higher Education that students enter their first year of College ready for life altering experiences. He writes,

The first year out, rather than being a time when behavior patterns and life priorities are reexamined and altered, is actually a time when prior patterns and priorities become more deeply habituated. What the vast majority of teens focus on during their first year out is daily life management: they manage the semiadult relationships that now characterize their social interactions; they manage their adult freedoms to use substances and be sexually active; and they manage expanded responsibilities for their daily life, including money, food, and clothes.

This resonates with my own experiences with first year College students. Learning to live on your own is an incredibly time consuming experience and is exacerbated by the proliferation of choices for young adults. Although first year College students tend to come in with somewhat idealistic expectations about examining their lives it doesn't take long for the pressures of "daily life management" to become the priority.

Each year Campus ministry and other other co curricular groups on our campus begin with large numbers of participants. By about the third week of classes we see a precipitous drop off in student engagement as they become busier.

The things that take priority are those that are required for daily life management...classes, friends, work, and extracurricular activities like music and sports that can require participation. That leaves participation in voluntary student activities like religious groups and other organizations at a disadvantage. Although there are always a committed core of students involved with these groups, getting more than casual participation from the broader student population is difficult.

The main way that we've worked to address this challenge in our ministry is to make place for both groups of people. With the relatively small minority of students that are determined to be involved we do more intensive sorts of discipling and leadership development.

We hope that this formation process helps them to think missionally, recognizing where God is already at work on campus and joining in that work. But we also have to make space for the larger majority who are either casual participants or uninterested in engagement.

I'll admit that accepting this reality is one of the hardest things about my job as a Campus Pastor. I of course want everyone to be involved, and when that doesn't happen I can tend to take it personally. Reading books like "The First Year Out" have really helped me better understand the many challenges that our students face and make space for them to be who they are.

Even though it's hard to be patient, I really do believe it's my job as Campus Pastor to love and accept all of our students unconditionally....or should I say incarnationally.

I've actually developed a mantra to remind myself of that. It's borrowed from theologian Andy Root who says "It's hard to have a relationship with someone if you're always trying to change them". That's such an important reminder for doing ministry with people their "first year out"...or at any age.