How the ‘Success Sequence’ Impacts Young Black and Hispanic Adults
June 1, 2022
The ‘success sequence‘—earning at least a high school degree, working full-time in your 20s, and marrying before having children—has been held up in recent years, particularly by conservative scholars, as a promising pathway to opportunity. In a new report, W. Bradford Wilcox and Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies respond to criticism that the sequence does not offer the same benefits to young workers of color because of the systemic disadvantages they face. Wilcox and Wang recently discussed the report in a webinar sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and Wilcox spoke to Spotlight about their new research. The transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Give us some of the background on this study
We did a previous report on the millennial success sequence and one of the lines of criticism raised was that the success sequence doesn’t really apply to disadvantaged young adults, whether they are African-American or Hispanic or from low-income families. The idea is there are substantial structural barriers for disadvantaged young adults that stand in their way when it comes to walking down the path associated with the sequence in terms of education, work, and marriage. Another line of criticism was that this is really a conservative approach to fighting poverty that’s not widely supported across racial and ethnic lines. We wanted to address both those criticisms in this report as well as a third criticism, that marriage per se is not really all that important because education and work really are the key drivers when it comes to thinking about poverty and economic success in America.
