Investing in the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults (2015) / Chapter Skim
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Summary
Pages 1-18
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From page 1... ...
Providing educational, economic, social, and health supports will help young adults assume adult roles, develop marketable skills, and adopt healthy lifelong habits that will benefit them, their children, and the nation. Despite popular attention to some of the special circumstances of young adults, however, they are too rarely treated as a distinct population in policy, program design, and research.
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The committee prepared this report to assist federal, state, and local policy makers and program leaders, as well as employers, nonprofit organizations, and other community partners, in developing and enhancing policies and programs to improve young adults' health, safety, and well-being. The report also suggests priorities for research to inform policy and programs for young adults.
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While there were always exceptions, these established milestones provided structure and direction for young adults as they assumed adult responsibilities. Today, those pathways are considerably less predictable, often extended, and sometimes significantly more challenging, as the following examples illustrate: • The cost of college has grown substantially, and many students have difficulty financing the investment or repaying the debt they incur, yet prospects for well-paying jobs for high school graduates without some postsecondary credential are slim.
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Despite some positives, however, the dominant pattern among young adults today is declining 2 The committee's use of this term is informed by the concept of social exclusion, a concept denoting the economic, social, political, and cultural marginalization experienced by specific groups of people because of social forces such as poverty, discrimination, violence and trauma, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Commitment to social inclusion is based on the belief that a democratic society benefits when all its members participate fully in community affairs.
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• Young adulthood is a time of heightened psychological vulnerabil ity and onset of serious mental health disorders, a problem com pounded by failure to recognize illness or to seek treatment. Recent data show that almost one-fifth of young adults aged 18-25 had a mental illness in the past year, and 4 percent had a serious mental illness.
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Investing in public health and clinical preventive services will also be important because health underlies young adults' abilities to be successful in education, employment, and social relationships. Efforts to prevent and ameliorate the effects of behavioral health problems, including mood
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Subsequent recommendations focus on the key domains of education and employment, civic engagement and national service, public health, health care systems, and government investments in marginalized young adults. Cross-Cutting Recommendation Recommendation 9-13: Federal, state, and local governments and non governmental entities that fund programs serving young adults or re search affecting the health, safety, or well-being of this population should differentiate young adults from adolescents and older adults whenever permitted by law and programmatically appropriate.
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8 INVESTING IN THE HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF YOUNG ADULTS • enhance new or existing surveys or experimental research focused on either adolescents or adults to advance knowledge regarding the health and well-being of young adults and healthy transitions into young adulthood; • ensure that services provided to young adults are developmentally and culturally appropriate, recognizing that while adolescent or general adult services may sometimes be appropriate, modifications to existing services or entirely new approaches may be needed; • engage diverse young adults in designing and implementing pro grams and services; • support workforce training for health and human services provid ers to develop the skills and knowledge needed to work with young adults and their families; • seek opportunities for coordinating services and, where possible, integrating them to achieve greater effectiveness and efficiency; and • develop, implement, and evaluate systematic policy and program experiments to help identify the most effective approaches to im proving the prospects of young adults. It is important to note that this recommendation is not intended to imply the creation of an extensive set of new programs targeted only at young adults.
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To accomplish these goals will require better integrating institutions of secondary and higher education with workforce agencies and ensuring that both are more responsive to labor market needs than is the case today. In addition, more research is needed on what works for young adults who are neither working nor in education and those with disabilities and chronic health conditions.
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• State governments should encourage local school systems and the 2- and 4-year colleges in their state to implement such interven tions, including by providing resources and assistance, and should rigorously evaluate them. • State and local school systems should particularly experiment with and evaluate programs designed to reduce the enormous dispari ties in high school and college completion that now exist by race, family income, and geographic location (urban versus rural)
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States should ensure as well that college students have access to up to-date labor market information and career counseling based on that information. T o facilitate state governments' implementation of these education and workforce development incentives, the committee recommends the fol lowing specific actions: • The U.S.
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Public Health Because young adults confront more challenges to health and safety than is commonly assumed, and given the desirability of nurturing lifelong healthy habits, public health programs and clinical preventive services for young adults should be a high priority. Mobile digital media and social networking have the potential to play a pivotal role as vehicles for public health interventions, and research on the effectiveness of these technologies is a high priority.
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From page 13... ...
This program presents a good opportunity to address some of the issues that are important for young adults. Recommendation 6-3: Recipients of Community Transformation Grants -- including state and local government agencies, tribes and territories, and nonprofit organizations -- should incorporate specific targets for young adults in their plans to reach the 5-year measurable performance goals in the areas of reducing death and disability due to tobacco use and reducing the rate of obesity through nutrition and physical activity interventions.
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the fact that navigating the health care system during the transition from pediatric to adult providers is confusing and difficult, especially for those with behavioral health problems or a chronic condition; and (3) the limited availability of behavioral health interventions developed specifically for young adults, the early stages of development of those interventions for young adults that do exist, and the limited availability of interventions with demonstrated efficacy specifically in this population.
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Recommendation 7-3: Federal, state, and local governments, com mercial insurers, employer-sponsored health plans, and medical and behavioral health systems should adopt the clinical preventive services recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, include the delivery of those services in quality performance metrics used for pay for-performance and other health care provider assessments, and re quire public reporting of compliance.
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Government Investments in Marginalized Populations Although young adults from marginalized populations are a heterogeneous group, they share a number of characteristics and experiences, such as living in poverty and behavioral health problems. Similarly, there is considerable overlap in the populations reached by the many programs that serve marginalized young adults.
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Depart ments of Health and Human Services, Labor, Justice, Housing and Urban Development, and Education -- and philanthropic funders should fund demonstration projects at the state level to support states in integrating program administrative data to better under stand marginalized young adults and evaluate programs serving them. • State government agencies serving marginalized young adults should expand on existing state and local efforts to integrate and use administrative data to better understand and serve these young adults.
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From page 18... ...
Providing more of the educational, economic, social, and health supports they need will help ensure equal opportunity, erase disparities, and enable more young adults to successfully embrace adult roles as healthy workers, parents, and citizens.
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