Only Half Of Middle School and High School Students Feel Prepared for Their Future: Creating an Agenda for Action

There is significant news in the 2024 Second Annual Walton Family Foundation-Gallup Voices of Gen Z Study, but first I have to begin with gratitude that this series of studies exist. As the authors of the study write at the beginning of their report, this generation is “more often spoken about than spoken with.”

So, so true!

I have conducted studies that speak with young people and share their voices for 25 years and know that few studies like theirs and ours do exist. I also know that it’s much easier to break public attentional barriers with studies that not only write ABOUT young people, but also LABEL them in negative terms (“anxious,” “lonely,” “selfish”—you select the word) than listen to them speak for themselves.

Young people are acutely aware of being negatively labelled. When I asked 9 through 19-year-olds in my latest nationally representative study, The Breakthrough Years Study, what adults should know about people their age, the largest proportion— 38 percent—asked adults not to label, generalize, or stereotype them. That’s a huge proportion for an open-ended question. So, kudos to the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup for carefully listening to the 12 to 27-year-olds of Gen Z and reporting on what they hear.

In sharing the six findings I see as most important, I am going to focus on the younger cohort in the sample, the 12 to 18-year-old students enrolled in middle or high schools, and on the fact that only about half of them feel prepared for their future.

Finding 1: To begin, more than half (55%) of middle and high school students report that they are thriving.

To assess thriving, Gallup asked young people to imagine a ladder with steps numbered zero on the bottom (representing the worst possible life) and 10 on the top (representing the best possible life). Students were considered thriving if they rated their lives as 7 or above at the present time and in five years as 8 or above.

For those who think that all young people are experiencing crises of mental health or loneliness, this finding—albeit just a number on an imaginary ladder— should remind us that there’s diversity in how young people are doing. We must take the problems of youth hugely, hugely seriously—as they do themselves, but never forget, as young people repeatedly wrote in my survey, “some—but not all—of us” are experiencing various challenges.

Finding 2: In fact, 29 percent of middle and high school students describe their mental health and emotional wellbeing as excellent and 48 percent as good—for a total of 77 percent.

Additionally, 18 percent describe their mental health as only fair and 4 percent as poor. For 15 to 17-year-olds in high school, the percentages are similar: 24 percent rate their mental health as excellent and 51 percent as good, totaling 75 percent overall overall with 20 percent reporting only fair and 4 percent poor.

How are we to reconcile this finding with the results of other studies, like the 42 percent of high school students in CDC’s 2021 survey who felt so sad or hopeless every day for at least two weeks in a row that they stopped doing their usual activities?  

Perhaps it’s that the CDC question took place during the pandemic and the Walton Family Foundation-Gallup study was post-pandemic (2024). But that doesn’t quite work, because the percentage reporting feeling sad and lonely in the CDC study has been rising steadily over the years, up from 28% in 2011. It also doesn’t work because there are increases in behavioral problems, like the rising number of visits to emergency rooms for mental health concerns.

So perhaps it’s that the Gallup study asks the question in general terms (rate your own mental health and wellbeing), while the CDC question is quite concrete, asking specifically about feeling sad and hopeless over a two-week period.

That reason for the discrepancy makes some sense to me because our own 2020 Breakthrough Years Study findings were similar to the CDC findings using quite specific questions. We found that 39% of high school students reported being bothered by feeling down, depressed or hopeless AND/OR by little interest or pleasure in doing things. This, by the way, is a standardized screening tool for depression. We also found that 29 percent of high school students felt stressed half the time or more over the last month, according to a five-item standardized measure.

What these all of these findings say to me is that we need to know how young people judge THEIR OWN mental health and wellbeing; that is, we need to know their criteria for feeling okay and not okay. That must be an essential question in civic science research. The second thing these findings say to me is that there are a substantial minority —from about 1 in 5 to about 2 in 5 high school students—who are reporting mental health challenges at any one point in time.

Finding 3: More than three quarters of young people somewhat or strongly agree, “I have a great future ahead of me.”

Thirty-two percent of middle and high school students strongly agree and 47 percent somewhat agree with this statement, with 17 percent neither agreeing or disagreeing. Only 4 percent somewhat or strongly disagree.

Our Breakthrough Years data show somewhat similar results using a 16-item index of hopeful future expectations. We found that among middle and high school students, 73 percent had high or very high future expectations in 2019 (pre-pandemic); in 2020 (during the pandemic), 64 percent felt this way. 

Finding 4: Very importantly, only 51 percent in the Gallup Study feel confident about being prepared for the future.

This to me is the most significant finding in the study—that only 12 percent of middle and high school students strongly agree and 39 percent somewhat agree that they feel prepared for the future. There doesn’t seem to be much difference either between middle and high school students.

So, what’s related to feeling prepared according to their study?

Finding 5: Mental health matters. The higher that students rate their mental health and wellbeing, the more prepared they feel.

The findings are like a stair-step ladder, as the figure from Walton Family Foundation Gallup report below shows.

Finding 6: Engagement matters. The more engaged students are in school, the better prepared they feel for their future.

Gallup uses a seven-item measure of school engagement for students, including being interested in, excited and challenged by what they are learning.

When the researchers controlled for demographics, they found that among middle and high school students, the most important predictor of feeling prepared for their future is engagement in school! In fact, the 25 percent of students who gave the highest scores to items assessing classroom engagement, “are more than four times as likely as the least-engaged students to strongly agree they have a great future ahead of them and are 10 times more likely to strongly agree they feel prepared for the future,” as shown from another figure in their report, below:

So, what do we do?

When I look at studies—theirs and ours—I always ask, “So what?” What can and should we do about the findings.

There are very clear implications from other findings in this study about how to increase engagement. For example, important are connecting learning to life outside of school, providing opportunities for hands-on learning and making content interesting. Their findings additionally reveal that the best teachers are those who care about each student as a person and that conversations about the future—about college and about jobs that don’t require college—are significant. In addition, reducing mental health challenges matters.

From my point of view one thing is still missing in what we study and what we do:

Young people need and want to learn life and learning skills

In The Breakthrough Years Study, I asked young people what they want adults to know about people their age.  Since my book’s been published, I’ve reversed the question and asked groups of young people I speak with to write down their responses to the following question:

What do YOU want to know about your own development?

Although the answers I’ve been hearing in no way constitute a study, the theme of skills stands out. For instance, students have written they want to know….

How to manage emotions healthier and to not procrastinate but how to be productive and prepare for my future when i have to figure that out and live on my own.

How can I develop a better mindset and outlook on life? What will be fulfilling for me as I get older?

As an 18-year-old, I'd want to know about my career path, how to manage my finances, how to navigate relationships, and how to develop my personal skills and interests. Basically, I'd want to know how to become the best version of myself and how to handle the challenges that come with adulthood.

They are quite aware that their parents aren’t always going to be right there and they need to learn concrete skills (managing their finances, which the Gallup Study does address) and more general life and learning skills like building better relationships, managing stress, and taking on challenges.

Here’s where I think we can begin to marry research on employers with research on brain science and on adolescents.

Research on employers

For years, I’ve been following the NACE Job Outlook Survey. Their 2024 report reveals that employers are shifting away from Grade Point Averages as a critical factor in hiring (down from 70% in 2016 to 38% in 2024) but instead are looking to work experience and a demonstration of skills. The most valued skills shift places in importance in their survey over the years I’ve been following it, but typically in the top rungs are skills in communication, problem-solving, teamwork and critical thinking. 

The figure below from the 2024 NACE report notably reveals that there’s a big gap between what employers look for in hew hires and how proficient employers think that job candidates are in the desired skills this year.

Research from brain science

Also notable is the fact that the skills employers are looking for and the skills young people say they need are developing rapidly during adolescence, a time when the  neural pathways of the brain are forming and being strengthened (the superhighways of the brain, as they’ve been called) and when the brain is especially sensitive to experience. 

These skills—like communicating, problem solving, which requires both creative and critical thinking, and team work, which requires perspective taking and communication—are based on a core set of attention regulation skills called executive functions skills that decades of research show are as, if not more important to academic and life success than IQ or socio-economic status.  Over the past two decades, we’ve learned not only a lot about the skills, but how to promote them.

An action agenda

Given the urgency of this situation, I’ve been feeling for a long time that we need to do something and we are! We are working with a group of school superintendents through AASA, the School Superintendent Organization to continue to listen to students about the skills they feel they need to learn and to parents, teachers and researchers. We will then use what we learn to take action with schools as our partners.  

Stay tuned!