Uncommonly Popular: Public Support for Teaching the Success Sequence in School

Young people who graduate from high school, get a job, and get married before having children, in that order, are far less likely to be in poverty and far more likely to have a solid footing in the middle class later in life. This path to adulthood has been dubbed the "success sequence." The cultural norms and values embedded in the success sequence are neither universal nor objectively good, and teaching it could alienate some, especially those who have deviated from it. However, proponents argue that whether you employ the success sequence as a normative argument about how young people should behave or as a pragmatic path that leads away from poverty, it would be a gross error to not teach young people about a sequence that is so strongly associated with avoiding poverty. Clearly, debates over the success sequence remain unsettled in rarified circles, but maybe that isn't important compared to public opinion on teaching the success sequence. Particularly in this season of contested views about what should and should not be taught in school and who should decide, a detailed description of what the public believes about teaching the success sequence should inform these discussions. In this report, Nat Malkus provides such a description using data from the August 2021 American Perspectives Survey (APS) conducted by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.