generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

Gen X = born between early 60s and early 80s
Gen Y / Millenials = born between early 80s and early 2000s

Gen Y == Millennial

neumark is probably distancing himself a bit by looking back at younger people and associating himself with the olds

which i think probably has to do with where you locate your adulthood relative to your supposed cohort; by snoball's counting i am gen x, but at the tail end, and i was reading about gen xers in their 30s when i was a teenager and not quite recognizing myself in them, except vicariously through slacker alt-culture etc. (they had a different relationship to the culture of their parents, whereas for me 'the 60s' was strictly history-book?, not even family / older-gen lore?) then when i was exiting college ca. 2k talk of 'millennials' picked up and seemed to peg them more as people only just then reaching adulthood (18 in 2k = enlistable, not quite yet drinking-legal).

Gen X = born between early 60s and early 80s
Gen Y / Millenials = born between early 80s and early 2000s

― that's you, that is (snoball), Saturday, December 21, 2013 6:27 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Back when Gen X was more of a buzzword, it was generally agreed that I was not a Gen X'er based on my '79 birth

these articles can suck my left nut, to put it as politely as i can

“I feel like their work ethic is a legitimate concern, even though it sounds like you’re a whiny old person complaining about the youth,”

self awareness A++++

feel like the """"millennial"""" work ethic is totally reasonable given the widely-publicized failure of hard work to get anyone anywhere in 21st c. america

are any sociologists who talk about generations starting to talk about increasing the rate of 'new generations' for recent kids? technology and society have moved so rapidly that a kid born in 2014 isn't going to share all that many experiences with one born in 2004 much less 1994

This whole idea of slicing up history into 'generations' is bull anyway. It only sort-of works with periods of social/political upheaval, like WW2 or the 1960s.

Mr. MacKenzie of Magid Generational Strategies has already helped coin a term for those born after the millennials: “plurals,” who he said will be “more pragmatic” and “much more individually focused on their own success.”

Think millennials are narcissistic? Just you wait.

ok who wants to start the Plurals thread??

Let some smartass kid do it i couldnt be fucked my dad he started threads fifty years man and boy still ended up in the cold ground of milwaukee with a pauper's gravestone me ill have none of it all i need in the world is a yard of brushed plaid, my 1500 dollar whalebone precision shave kit and this here latte

lol

The torch is pased it's yours to return
Lay at their feet now use it to burn
For marketing the use of the word generation
A false alliance of money persuading
Forcing silence sound sucking
Forced into this conversation
Now if you want to sieze the sound you don't need a reservation
So open so young so target I can smell your heart you're a target

This whole idea of slicing up history into 'generations' is bull anyway. It only sort-of works with periods of social/political upheaval, like WW2 or the 1960s.

like coming of age w/ the existence of the internet, being young / a young adult during 9/11, iraq + afghanistan, entering the job market during the great recession (or in its aftermath) - i think more than many generations millennials have experienced shared social/political upheaval.

But that upheaval was also experienced by everyone else, not just people in a certain age range. Which is also why I said 'only sort-of works' above, because although the effects of WW2 and the 1960s could be said to have affected each person in a particular age group in a broadly similar way, the closer an individual's experience is examined the more unique they are, even compared to other apparently very similar peers. What I'm laboriously trying to say is that the idea of 'generations' in a sociopolitical sense only begins to work if you're looking at people in such a broad view that practically all detail is lost. Which makes such a view pretty much meaningless.

as a falsifiable model it fails but generations are an interesting way to talk about evolving/shifting attitudes on a more macro scale. why do particular beliefs + ethics shift over time? we def see dramatic shifts in this things when we interview different age cohorts. younger ppl have more liberal views on a variety of social issues (gay marriage, marijuana legalization) and maybe the generational construct lets us talk about some of those things. i agree tho that saying any generation is 'hard working' or 'entitled' or whatever is just silly. but it's not silly to note that american millennials will be one of the rare generations to earn less money than their parents.

well that's why there are demographers

don't think sociologists treat "generations" in the solid, sequential sense being derided here.

Here is a characteristic generational/"of our times" thing that I think is striking -- my salary at age 30 was less than my dad's at 30, yet more than he makes now.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/09/at_berkeley_krugmans_warning_becomes_reality/

on a new documentary about the privatization of u.c. berkeley

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-02/the-scandal-bowl-tar-heels-football-academic-fraud-and-implicit-racism

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20140210.png

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/10/from_harvard_to_webcam_girl/

is there a religion i could join that would be deeply against this not for any perversion-related reasons, but because the post-post-post-whatever economy that drives it is destroying the fabric of society in which people can just get together and be perverted

All I see in that post is a petulant rich girl who is so mad that she didn't immediately get an awesome job that she decided to take her clothes off.

didn't get that at all

i can't help but relate to the life of a soul-crushing office drone. good for her *shrug*

I had recently earned my master’s degree from Harvard and had accepted a coveted yet thankless entry-level position at a well-known philanthropic organization in New York City.

A thankless entry-level job! They didn't tell me it was going to be like this!

nobody ever does

Hey, I've seen those ads for "entry level" non-profit jobs and I've complained about them before. List of requirements: be ivy league, have lots of internships, show a writing portfolio/x number of writing samples, know all these unrelated computer programs, speak a couple of languages, have professional AND character references, just really A FUCKING LOT of stuff...to be an office manager and be grateful to occasionally have the chance to serve NGO executives when their travel plans go wrong.

And be that very smart, accomplished person, and then be content to spend at least a few years just making appointments and ordering staples and if you're lucky doing basically uncompensated labor way above your pay grade.

Nuh uh.

So...don't work in a non-profit? Why do people think that a fancy degree entitles them to interesting, challenging and well-compensated work where they ALSO get to feel like they are saving the world, right out the door from school?

...

she got a MASTERS degree from harvard cmon anyone can get a masters from harvard

nobody's holding a gun to their heads!

ivy league schools + schools in cool places to live use terminal masters degrees as money printing machines

Most people don't know how to actually DO anything useful in a professional setting straight out of school

also what iatee said, although to be fair, I don't think enough people going into these programs really realize this

this piece is nightmarish to me, would not hold the pro forma "oh millenials oh lord" reaction against anyone over this

it also fits nicely into the Dunhamesque "I did a thing to be interesting" narrative

well they don't hand out publishing deals for just having master's degrees

look at me, don't look at me, look at me

i'm the first to react adversely to "you have opportunities, don't be lazy, make something of yourself" rhetoric. but if you have a masters from harvard then for fucks sake you have opportunities, make something of yourself.

her poor parents.

i mean why do you want to be published. that's not a thing anymore.

or maybe you know that if you write about like being an "intellectual erotic blahblah" then you will be published.

her story seems totally similar to a male friend of mine who is a recent art school grad who was a guy on gay cam sites for money to help him get by as he negotiated the post-graduation fallout zone. he went through the same cycle of suddenly getting lots of money and interest, and then it cooled down as his novelty faded, and then it became kind of alienating and forced, and gradually he just stopped doing it until he found a regular job that he likes better- but he was at it for about a year. he's someone who totally fits the "adorable gay twink stereotype" look - white and thin with good bone structure- so it's not surprise that he was appealing, but he said that you had to work at it if you wanted to make real money and that mostly involved always being available/accessible. So, not really an escape route from the typical work week, hours-wise, it was just different hours, and the sheer weirdness of having to babble "dirty talk" to strangers for hours at a time became really unpleasant for him.

i got a vague whif of untruth from that story (not tune's friend, the salon thing) but i can't really put my finger on it w/o rank speculation

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2014/03/28/the-most-expensive-colleges-in-the-country-are-art-schools-not-ivies/

also posted this in the art mfa thread but I think it belongs here

so goddamn expensive

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/buying-the-future/

Given how finance has been able to convert the future of raw materials, corporations, and land into tradable instruments, what about “human capital?” University of Chicago economist Gary Becker defines human capital as investments people make in themselves, including their own education, skills and health. As with land and raw resources, “people cannot be separated from their knowledge, skills, health, or values in the way they can be separated from their financial and physical assets,” so they can’t just count as capital the way money in their bank account does. It resides in the human, as opposed to capital in the form of property, which exists due to a dense network of property law and customs.

The most likely route for human-capital futures is standardizing through funding for individual education. Startups are trying to turn young college students into cows or mortgages by trying to render predictable the future salaries they’ll earn based on their higher education, which comes with current known cost. A combination of state disinvestment, an exploding managerial class, and a grouping of elite schools that can drive up tuition have all combined to make a huge amount of upfront capital necessary for the sort of college degree that can secure employment. Finance will have to jump into the picture. If it proves a lucrative investment, it may flood people into higher education, assuming they can compel work and profit later. This could send so much money into higher education that its prices will spiral, as with the housing bubble.

What else could go wrong with a society where, as Malcolm Harris described it, “a sizable portion of our young workers are partly owned by other people—at least the ones who can find buyers”? The element of control over what students learn will become tantamount. The ideal graduate will have to be embodied in the contract itself, just like for healthy cows. Otherwise, students will simply learn rather than valorize their human capital at the investors’ expected rate. Whereas most financial engineering has tried (and at times catastrophically failed) to value contracts by extrapolating from past data, there will most likely be demand to directly control human capital more directly. You can’t bully a cow into avoiding hoof-and-mouth disease, but you can bully an 18-year-old into doing its organic chemistry homework.

i think the obv problem is that you can't really bully an 18-year-old into doing its organic chemistry homework