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Why working-class youth don’t finish college—and what can make the difference.
Headlines proclaim that girls are displacing boys in college. But that’s not the whole story. Drawing on a landmark decade-long study of more than three thousand young Americans and the personal stories behind the numbers, Ilana M. Horwitz and Kaylee T. Matheny reveal that among working-class families, boys disengage early from school, disconnecting from the adults and institutions that could keep them on track. While girls persist through school longer, they are slowly worn down by the competing demands of work and family. The result: Fewer than one in five working-class youth earn a college degree, regardless of gender.
Whether working-class kids earn a degree isn’t simply about aspirations, finances, or biology. It’s about how the adults and institutions surrounding young people either anchor the path to a degree or make the climb impossible. Burnt Out and Left Behind is about the nurses, teachers, and engineers we never got because we left young people to navigate college on their own—and what becomes possible when someone is there to guide their way.
Ilana M. Horwitz is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Tulane University and author of the award-winning book God, Grades, and Graduation and The Entrepreneurial Scholar.
Kaylee T. Matheny is Assistant Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.
“Ilana Horwitz and Kaylee Matheny urge us to consider the price of women’s so-called educational victory, looking beyond simplistic ways to measure a gender revolution through academic achievement. Their work unites rich longitudinal data with historical arguments to tell a deeply compelling story about the structural forces behind inequity in education.”—Ranita Ray, author of Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom
“Burnt Out and Left Behind is an impassioned, compelling plea to better understand working-class youth. Original and well-written, it shows how working-class youth must cope with relational scarcity—overwhelmed parents, overextended teachers—while middle-class youth gain from relational abundance—involved parents, multiple anchors, and response support systems.”—Andrew Cherlin, Johns Hopkins University
"Burnt Out and Left Behind is fabulous. It describes perhaps the greatest challenge of every child, which is to obtain a satisfactory adult identity. The authors especially describe the enormous differences in this struggle for children from 'middle-class families' (where parents have college education) in comparison to the struggle for children from 'working-class families' (where parents lack college education). As one of its great beauties, this book does not just give statistical description of differences between these two groups. Much more than that, it describes in detail the thinking and motivations of individuals as they grow up from their late teens into the adulthood of their late twenties. The book is written with the skill of the world’s great novelists, so that readers understand and sympathize with what the subjects are thinking. In turn, that allows us (the readers) to identify why some of those subjects manage their journey into adulthood so well, whereas others—even trying as best they can—are nevertheless unsuccessful. Burnt Out and Left Behind is among the handful of the very best books that I have read over my eighty-five-year lifetime. In addition, I hope that every American will read it, so that all of us can understand each other better (as we also may better understand our own histories).”—George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001 “A timely investigation showing how the class divide in the United States shapes opportunities for girls and boys, and women and men, differently. Rich in both data and stories, this book starkly illuminates the different challenges faced by both working-class men and women. Authoritative, vivid, even-handed, and compelling.”—Richard V. Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men "Burnt Out and Left Behind provides new insights into the gendered challenges American millennials faced as they entered adulthood. Working-class men and women both found themselves unmoored from supportive relationships, while women also faced a ‘triple burden’ of academic, work, and domestic responsibilities. This book provides a compassionate window into why some men are left behind, while highlighting the impossible burdens working-class young women are being asked to carry. It's a must-read for anyone interested in class, gender, and social mobility in American society today."—Elizabeth A. Armstrong, coauthor of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality "Girls anchored and boys adrift, a searing and intimate account of how boys’ unearned estrangement and girls’ unfair responsibilities drain both of the resources to better their lives, with fresh policy proposals for boosting our boys and setting our girls free. Lucid and essential reading for anyone who cares about young people."—Lisa D. Wade, author of Exposed: A College in Crisis Puts Science to the Test "The story we've been told about ‘girls winning' and ‘boys losing’ is wrong. Horwitz and Matheny masterfully show us what's really happening—and why we've been so willing to mistake women's exhaustion for success. Burnt Out and Left Behind is a must-read for anyone who wants to move beyond the reductive headlines."—Jessica Valenti, feminist writer and activist