A new op-ed in The Wall Street Journal argues that American culture should more explicitly endorse “the sequence:” the notion that the path to success involves education, work, and marriage, in that order. The article’s author, Wendy Wang, claims that preaching the sequence’s value, as is typical in China, gives kids clear goals that statistically make them less likely to live in poverty. Wang uses research she completed in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth to prove the sequence’s track record, as the poverty rate decreases for each additional step of the sequence completed. The research found that the poverty rate for millennials who graduated high school, found full-time work, and got married before having kids was three percent. Wang believes that this three-step process should be culturally-encouraged in schools.
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