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In a recent study accepted for publication in the American Educational Research Journal, Soo-yong Byun, professor of education, demography and Asian studies at Penn State, explored how family socioeconomic background influences adolescents' occupational expectations in the U.S. and the U.K. The paper is available on the ResearchGate preprint server.

Drawing on nearly two decades of international data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), he and his co-authors examined how those relationships evolved between 2000 and 2018.

In this Q&A, Byun spoke about what the findings reveal, why adolescents' occupational expectations matter and what educators can learn from the research.

Have adolescents' occupational expectations changed over time? How?

We found that adolescents' occupational expectations increased steadily between 2000 and 2018 in both the U.S. and the U.K. More adolescents aspired to high-status occupations such as medicine, law and engineering. While our study was not designed to identify the causes of this trend, it is consistent with broader economic and social changes, including but not limited to the expansion of knowledge-based occupations, rising parental educational attainment and increasingly high expectations for children's educational and career success.

How do occupational expectations compare between teens in the U.S. and U.K.?

We found that American adolescents reported higher occupational expectations than their British counterparts between 2000 and 2015. However, by 2018, this difference had largely disappeared because occupational expectations increased more rapidly among British adolescents in recent years. Although our study was not designed to identify the causes of this convergence, it is consistent with major educational reforms in the U.K. that emphasized greater comprehensiveness, expanded educational opportunities and efforts to raise young people's aspirations.

We also examined the relationship between family socioeconomic background and occupational expectations. In the U.S., this relationship remained relatively modest and stable over time, perhaps reflecting the enduring appeal of the "American Dream" and the country's largely comprehensive secondary school system, which may encourage students from diverse backgrounds to aspire to similar occupations.

In contrast, socioeconomic disparities in occupational expectations declined in the U.K. Historically, the U.K.'s more stratified education system, with earlier and more consequential academic tracking, may have linked students' career expectations more closely to their socioeconomic origins. As educational pathways have broadened and aspirations have been actively promoted, however, this relationship appears to have weakened, suggesting that young people's occupational expectations are becoming less constrained by family background, particularly for high-status careers.

Why do adolescents' occupational expectations matter? How can educators, schools and career counselors use this information to better support students as they prepare for the future—especially with rapid advances in artificial intelligence and changing attitudes toward college and careers?

Adolescents' occupational expectations matter because they are among the strongest predictors of later educational attainment and labor market outcomes. They also provide an early indicator of future inequality. When socioeconomic disparities in occupational expectations widen or narrow, they often foreshadow corresponding changes in educational and economic inequality.

Our findings suggest that schools and policymakers can play an important role in shaping these expectations. Educational systems that expand opportunities and encourage ambitious but realistic aspirations may help reduce socioeconomic disparities in career expectations. Educators and career counselors can use this information to identify students whose aspirations may be constrained by limited exposure to educational or occupational opportunities, provide more personalized career guidance and broaden students' awareness of the pathways available to them. Such efforts can help ensure that career aspirations are shaped more by students' talents and interests than by their family background.

Looking ahead, rapid advances in artificial intelligence are likely to transform the labor market and alter the skills needed for future occupations. It is still too early to know how these changes will influence adolescents' educational and career expectations, but understanding this relationship will be increasingly important. The release of the PISA 2025 data later this year will provide an important opportunity to examine how AI and other emerging societal changes are reshaping young people's visions of their future careers.

Publication details

Study: Soo-yong Byun et al, Shifting futures: Trends in socioeconomic disparities in adolescents' expected occupational status in the United States and the United Kingdom, 2000–2018 (2026).

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Citation: Q&A: What influences teens' career expectations? (2026, July 27) retrieved 28 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-qa-teens-career.html

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The milestone birthday is no coincidence as the project was created to honor the moment and was done “with the blessings” of Monroe estate holders Authentic Brands Group. Described in official press materials as “a love letter to one of cinema’s most enduring icons,” Flesh Impact casts Johnson as Monroe at the height of her fame while Burstyn stars as an imagined version of Monroe later in life. (Monroe was 36 when she died on Aug. 4, 1962.) Peter Sarsgaard and The Pitt star Sepideh Moafi round out the cast.

The film is produced by William Green for The Cut, Michelle Ross for Superprime, Nicolette Spencer and Melissa Moore for INNOCEAN, and is presented by automotive brand Genesis. Maddi Carlton, Brandon Boerner, Rebecca Skinner, David Webb and Courtney Kivowitz serve as executive producers.

“I’ve always been fascinated by Marilyn Monroe. So, when Genesis first came to me with the idea of a celebratory project for her centennial, I knew I wanted to work together on bringing this story to life,” Gyllenhaal said in a statement. “With Flesh Impact, we showcase the timeless icon we know and love through a modern lens that reclaims her story.”

Gyllenhaal’s creative team also included production designer Karen Murphy (Elvis), casting director Mary Vernieu (The Last of Us), costume designer Jennifer Johnson (Bugonia), editor Affonso Gonçalves (Hamnet) and director of photography Lawrence Sher (The Bride).

“At Genesis, we believe the arts have a unique ability to inspire reflection, spark meaningful conversation, and connect people through stories that endure across generations,” said Amy Marentic, chief marketing officer at Genesis Motor America. “Our support of this film honoring Marilyn Monroe reflects our commitment to celebrating cultural icons whose influence extends far beyond their time.”

The full Venice Film Festival lineup can be found here. Burstyn has other official business at the festival: She stars in Kornel Mundruczo’s out of competition title Place to Be and has been plucked to receive a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.

The first look at Flesh Impact was first reported by Vanity Fair. “This film is very much a mixture of Marilyn and my fantasy of her,” Gyllenhaal told the magazine’s Rebecca Ford. “In a lot of ways, this movie is about Marilyn and also about actresses in general and what it’s like to have that strange, very vulnerable, and, at the same time, very powerful job.” %!s()

Under heavy braking, an F1 driver can apply around 353 pounds of force to the brake pedal while simultaneously experiencing upward of 6g on their body. Besides being one of the tracks that only hosted a single F1 race, the Tuscan GP in 2020 saw Lewis Hamilton hit a max of 5.6g through Turn 7 — comparable to the peak forces sustained during a rocket launch. At those levels, an untrained body would struggle to hold its own head steady, let alone drive at 200+ mph while processing radio information and planning overtakes.

The biggest single force is felt on the neck, which is why most F1 drivers' fitness routines highlight neck training. The current F1 Champion Lando Norris exercises his neck at least five times a week, according to his trainer John Malvern. If a driver can't hold their head steady enough to see exactly where they're going, they lose valuable time each lap. Besides neck training, driver regimens include core-strengthening exercises, cognitive conditioning, and lots of cardio.

The key mental and physical demands

Motorsport Photography F1/Shutterstock

The specific exercises used to develop this strength are as unusual as the requirement demands. During gym sessions, drivers train with 15 pound weighted helmets and resistance bands around the head to simulate sustained lateral g-force. The most intense workout involves strapping 66 pounds of weight around the head and suspending it from the edge of a table. This technique builds the neck's capacity to resist forces similar to those of high-speed F1 cornering. The ever-entertaining F1 vet Daniel Ricciardo offered a useful caveat on neck progression for Red Bull's coverage of driver training: "Your neck's fragile, so you don't want to start by putting 10kg plates on the side of your head."

The neck is the priority, but it's not the whole picture. Drivers perform core exercises that copy driving positions – stability balls with weight plates rotated like a steering wheel, medicine ball rotations, and planks that reinforce the base needed to resist lateral forces. A three-minute all-out sprint covering over 900 meters is one standard cardio benchmark. Cycling, swimming, and high-altitude cross-country skiing appear regularly in drivers' off-season plans. The goal of all of it is a lean, functional physique — strong enough to withstand hours of sustained g-force or potential impacts without bulk that would weigh them down.

Mental preparation sits alongside the physical work. Cognitive training, visualization, and pressure management are structured parts of the routine, because making split-second decisions at speed requires mental conditioning, as well physical strength. During race season, drivers train around the calendar — and even their sleep is managed, with coaches coordinating with hotels in advance on room temperature, pillows, and rest supplements. At the cutting edge of motorsport, even recovery is training, too. %!s()

The share path is blocked by robots.txt on claude.ai. These pages also send back an X-Robots-Tag header set to none, which Google’s robots meta tag guidelines treat as the same as noindex and nofollow.

Because of this, the rules conflict with each other. According to Google’s guidance, a noindex tag only works if the crawler is allowed to access and read the page. If a page is blocked by robots.txt, it can still be indexed if other pages link to it, since Googlebot notes the URL without actually opening it.

The pairing is not unique to AI companies. If Google discovers a blocked URL elsewhere, it can list the URL without crawling the noindex.

What Happened

404 Media reported on Monday that Claude share pages were showing up through the site: operator. TechCrunch reported being able to find medical material, internal company documents, and files carrying the names and phone numbers of primary school-aged children. Artifacts, the documents and mini apps built inside Claude, showed up through a second path.

Much of the coverage, including The Decoder, reported that the share pages lacked a noindex tag. As of July 27, a noindex header is being served and sits behind a robots.txt block. It’s unclear whether that header was in place before the weekend, as I couldn’t confirm this.

What The Crawl Rules Return

Findings from my July 27 checks against claude.ai:

• The robots.txt file at claude.ai disallows /share/* under the User-agent: * group, with no separate Googlebot group, so that is the group Google goes by.
• A live share URL responds with the header x-robots-tag: none on a GET request.
• The same header appears when the request claims to be Googlebot, and the response includes Vary: User-Agent.
• The /public/artifacts/ path is not listed in robots.txt.

I didn’t verify whether artifact URLs return a page-level noindex, so these two paths can’t be compared based on their controls.

Independent IT consultant Daniel J. Glover reported the same conflict on July 26. My check shows the setup still in place on July 27, after it was reported that the chats were no longer displayed in search results, but I couldn’t establish what was served to Google when those URLs were first discovered.

Why Blocking A Page Doesn’t Remove It

Robots.txt helps guide how search engines crawl your website, but it doesn’t decide what gets indexed. Google has been clarifying this for years.

For example, John Mueller explains that even pages blocked by robots.txt can appear in search results if other pages link to them. If you want to keep a page out of search results, using the “noindex” tag is the right choice. Martin Splitt also recommends avoiding placing both rules on the same page. Google recently emphasized this distinction again, as seen in their update last week.

Blocking URLs with robots.txt doesn’t remove already indexed pages. For a more permanent removal, Google’s guidance is to use a “noindex” tag that its crawler can read.

Anthropic’s Response

Anthropic told TechCrunch that share links will appear in search results only if people post them in accessible locations for crawlers, and that links sent through private messages won’t be indexed.

Spokeswoman Amie Rotherham added that these links “are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves.” This addresses one way a public share URL can be discovered, but it doesn’t address the conflicting rules I found on July 27.

Google spokesperson Ned Adriance stated that search engines do not determine which pages are made public, and that Google provides site owners with control over crawling and indexing and follows those controls.

Why This Matters

Any chats or artifacts you haven’t unshared are still accessible to anyone with the link. In Claude, go to Settings > Privacy > Shared Chats to see a complete list.

Unsharing a chat disables the direct link, but removing the URL from Google is a different thing. As a Claude user, you can’t control what it serves to Googlebot or submit a removal request, as these are managed by Anthropic.

Artifacts are published through their own process, which makes unsharing a chat and unpublishing an artifact from that chat two separate actions.

Beyond settings changes, consider establishing a rule around sharing AI chats and artifacts. If a chat contains something you wouldn’t post publicly, don’t share it through a link that might get indexed later.

Looking Ahead

The pattern isn’t unique to Anthropic. OpenAI pulled shared ChatGPT chats from search in August 2025, and Google blocked Bard transcripts from indexing in 2023. Each case involved a public share URL that traveled further than its owner may have expected.

Three companies have now had customer chats turn up in search. That’s reason enough to treat a public share link as a public webpage from the moment it exists.

Featured Image: Cast of Thousands/Shutterstock %!s()

Hip osteoarthritis affects millions of people around the world and is a major cause of long-term pain and disability. Exercise is commonly recommended as one of the first treatments for reducing symptoms and maintaining mobility.

Exercise Benefits May Be Modest

Researchers from the University of Sydney and University of Melbourne found that exercise leads to small average improvements in pain and physical function among people with hip osteoarthritis. However, those gains may not be large enough to create a meaningful difference in patients' daily lives.

The review analyzed 18 clinical trials involving 1,368 participants. Most were women (63%), and their ages ranged from 53 to 74, so the results may not apply as well to younger adults.

The exercise programs differed considerably across the studies. They lasted anywhere from two to 52 weeks and included strengthening exercises, aerobic activity, and mind-body approaches.

Pain Relief May Fall Below Noticeable Levels

When exercise was compared with usual care or no treatment, it probably lowered pain by about 7 points on a 100-point scale. Experts generally consider a reduction of at least 12 points necessary for patients to notice a meaningful improvement in daily life.

Physical function followed a similar pattern, with only modest average gains. The researchers noted that the thresholds used to define a meaningful improvement were developed mainly from studies involving knee osteoarthritis or mixed groups of osteoarthritis patients. As a result, they may not perfectly reflect the experience of people with hip osteoarthritis.

Exercise also appeared to produce little or no improvement in quality of life, regardless of which comparison group was used.

"Exercise is recommended as a primary treatment for hip osteoarthritis, and this review doesn't overturn that," said Michelle Hall, co-lead author from the University of Sydney. "But it does suggest we should be honest with patients that the average benefit may be modest, and that we need better-designed trials to understand who benefits most and from which type of exercise."

Exercise Is Still Recommended

The findings do not suggest that exercise is ineffective or that it should no longer be recommended. Physical activity provides many health benefits beyond arthritis, costs relatively little, and is unlikely to cause harm.

Still, most of the studies included in the review were small and unblinded, which may have affected the results. Because participants knew whether they were exercising and reported their own pain and function, the benefits of exercise may have appeared larger than they actually were.

Better Hip Osteoarthritis Studies Are Needed

The authors say larger and more carefully designed trials are needed to show what exercise can realistically accomplish for people with hip osteoarthritis. Future research should also identify which types of exercise are most effective for particular patients.

"There just isn't a huge body of evidence out there," said Belinda Lawford, co-lead author from the University of Melbourne. "For some people struggling with hip pain, exercise can really be their only hope, but I also don't want to give patients false hope. It's important future research is done with larger, better-quality trials, examining what types of exercise work specifically for different people." %!s()