American culture loves a demographic shortcut. We say teenagers. We say college students. We say Gen Z. We say young people, as though a 15-year-old sophomore and a 24-year-old trying to pay rent, build a career and decide whether to open an investment account are variations of the same person.
That shorthand is convenient. It is also beginning to look increasingly useless.
Refuel Agency, the Princeton, New Jersey-area media and marketing firm, released its 2026 Youth, College & Young Adult Explorer on Sept. 24 after surveying 1,545 respondents and deliberately separating teens ages 15 to 17, young adults ages 18 to 24, adults 25 and older, and college versus non-college young adults. The point of the redesign was not cosmetic. Refuel says roughly four in ten young people do not attend college, which means a research model built around the college experience can quietly omit a huge share of the population it claims to describe.
Young adults, not teenagers, lead brand discovery on TikTok and Instagram in Refuel's results. Thirty percent of young adults reported discovering brands on TikTok, compared with 28 percent of teens. On Instagram, the gap is larger: 29 percent of young adults compared with 23 percent of teens. The study also reports that adults 25 and older spend about 40 hours per week on social platforms compared with 24 hours for teens, while college students also come in at about 40 hours.
That is not quite the cultural picture we have spent the past decade carrying around. Social media is usually framed as a teenage habitat that adults enter reluctantly. Parents worry about teen screen time. Lawmakers debate teen access. Marketers race after whatever teenagers are supposedly doing this week. Adults make jokes about being too old to understand TikTok.
But perhaps social media does not peak because someone is young. Perhaps its role changes as life gets more complicated.
The 18-to-24 period is when digital platforms can begin doing considerably more work at once. They are not merely entertainment feeds or places to keep up with friends. They can become part of dating, job hunting, professional identity, shopping, apartment hunting, event discovery, networking, news consumption and the maintenance of relationships that are suddenly spread across schools, workplaces and cities.
Refuel's release does not measure every one of those activities individually, but the broader pattern is easy to recognize: early adulthood creates more decisions, more weak ties, more searching and more reasons to use a platform as infrastructure rather than diversion.
Social media does not necessarily become less important when childhood ends. It acquires more jobs.
That distinction matters because our language tends to freeze behavior at the moment we first notice it. TikTok became culturally synonymous with teenagers, so teenagers remain the mental picture even as the user base ages and the purposes multiply. The same thing happened with Facebook, which spent years trapped in the public imagination as a college network long after it became the place where somebody's aunt announced a yard sale and a neighborhood association argued about garbage pickup.
The more interesting part of Refuel's research, though, may be the decision to stop using college as a proxy for youth.
The American default story still runs high school to college to career. That path is so culturally dominant that it sneaks into research design, marketing plans, news coverage and even ordinary conversation. Ask what young adults are doing and the answer is often built from a sample of college students because college students are visible, concentrated and easy to categorize. They live on campuses. They have institutional email addresses. They attend events. They can be found.
Young adults who go directly into the workforce, apprenticeships, military service, caregiving, gig work or any of the dozens of less tidy post-high-school paths are harder to package as a single population. So they are frequently discussed less, even when they represent an enormous portion of the age group.
Refuel's redesign is interesting precisely because it acknowledges that methodological convenience can become cultural blindness. If roughly 40 percent of young people are outside the college path, then "what college students are doing" and "what young people are doing" were never interchangeable questions.
The financial findings make the same point from another direction. Young adults in the study report the lowest credit-card ownership, at 58 percent compared with 75 percent among adults, and the lowest average spending, $676 compared with $982. Yet they also report the highest average number of investments held among the segments measured. That is a strange combination if early adulthood is imagined simply as an extended version of adolescence. It makes more sense if 18 to 24 is understood as its own compressed period of experimentation, partial independence and uneven financial maturity.
The parental-influence numbers show how quickly that transition can happen. Refuel reports that parents influence 78 percent of teen automobile purchases. By the college years, 58 percent of students say they make their own vehicle decisions. A few years separate those groups, but the decision structure changes dramatically.
This is why the phrase "young people" can be so deceptive. Age brackets look smooth on a spreadsheet. Life does not.
A 17-year-old may have a phone, a job and a social identity that looks adult from the outside while still relying on parents for transportation, insurance, financial decisions and permission. An 18-year-old may be living in a dorm. Another 18-year-old may be working full time. A 22-year-old might be finishing college, raising a child, serving in the military, running a small business, living at home or doing several of those things at once. Grouping them together can be statistically efficient while flattening the very differences that explain their behavior.
There is also a useful marketing lesson buried here, but it extends well beyond marketing. Refuel's own data shows that reach and conversion are not the same thing. Social ads and influencer content attract attention, but coupons, free food and product sampling produce stronger action in the reported results. That is another reminder that visibility is not behavior and exposure is not commitment. The platform where somebody notices a brand is not necessarily the thing that makes them buy.
The same caution should apply whenever we talk about generations. A label can tell us who was born during roughly the same period. It cannot tell us whether they are in school, working, financially independent, living with parents, raising children, looking for a first apartment or using TikTok for exactly the same reason.
Refuel is a marketing agency, and this is proprietary audience research designed in part to inform its media planning and AI targeting models, not a peer-reviewed academic study. The public release also does not provide the full sampling, weighting and fieldwork detail that would be needed to independently evaluate every estimate. The findings are best read as one company's large audience snapshot rather than the final word on American youth behavior.
But the segmentation itself raises a question worth keeping even if every percentage changes next year. Why are we still so comfortable talking about young people as though adolescence, college and early adulthood are one continuous state?
The more closely we look, the less useful the shortcut becomes. Teenagers are not merely younger college students. College students are not a stand-in for everybody their age. And young adults are not just teenagers with a few extra birthdays behind them.
They are moving through one of the fastest periods of change in adult life, and the platforms around them are changing jobs at the same time.
Maybe the surprising thing is not that the data looks different once we separate the groups. Maybe the surprising thing is how long we kept lumping them together.
SOURCE NOTES
• Refuel Agency. “Refuel Agency Releases 2026 Youth, College & Young Adult Explorer: The Real Social-Media Peak Isn’t Teens — It’s Young Adults.” PR Newswire, Sept. 24, 2026. This is the primary source for the 1,545-person sample, age segmentation, TikTok and Instagram brand-discovery figures, weekly social-media use, college/non-college distinction, spending and credit-card data, investment ownership, parental influence, and conversion findings. Official study release on PR Newswire
• Refuel Agency. “Refuel Agency.” Company website. Accessed Sept. 24, 2026. Supporting source for Refuel’s research and marketing work, its Explorer research programs, and company background. Refuel Agency official website
• Refuel Agency. “Contact Us.” Supporting source for the company’s New Jersey headquarters information. Refuel lists its headquarters at 68 Culver Road, Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, within its Princeton-area operation. Refuel Agency contact and headquarters information
• Refuel Agency. “Teen Marketing Agency.” Supporting background on Refuel’s proprietary Explorer Series research and its segmentation of teen, college and Gen Z audiences. Refuel Agency teen and youth research overview
Survey findings attributed to Refuel Agency's 2026 Youth, College & Young Adult Explorer release and company pages cited in SOURCE NOTES; proprietary research, not peer-reviewed. Cultural framing is RMN's.