Sociological Forum, Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2001 ( C  2001) Patterns of Work and Schooling in Young Adulthood Elizabeth C. Cooksey 1,3 and Ronald R. Rindfuss 2 If the years of late adolescence and early adulthood are depicted as rocky, disorderly, and experimental, then how should the life course stage that imme- diately follows be characterized? Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, we focus on work and school activities in the latter half of the young adult years (ages roughly 25–31) to empirically address whether the diversity of work and schooling patterns diminishes. Find- ing a lack of orderliness in work and schooling trajectories, and that holding two or more activities simultaneously is quite common, we question how this stage of the life course should be conceptualized. Moving away from the tra- ditional sequential roles approach, we use multinomial logistic regression to differentiate among activity sequences commonly held by young men and women at these ages, and address how family of origin background factors and prior life experiences influence life course experiences in the later 20s and early 30s. KEY WORDS: work; schooling; event sequencing; young adulthood. Within life course and developmental research, certain stages of indi- viduals’ lives have received a disproportionate amount of research attention: Childhood, adolescence, the early 20s, and the time around retirement. These are stages commonly characterized by numerous life course changes with po- tential far-reaching effects. The transition to adulthood, for example, is an especially prominent dynamic time when youths become more economically 1 Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 300 Bricker Hall, 190 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210. 2 Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Campus Box 3210, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514. 3 To whom correspondence should be addressed; e-mail: cooksey.1@osu.edu. 731 0884-8971/01/1200-0731/0 C  2001 Plenum Publishing Corporation