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

yeah, the UC schools (& other public schools in which I may have more of an interest soon if things go well) have less inexpensive tuition---semi-privatizing the universities is an ongoing thing.

still kind of amazed at the value of public universities in the USA though; bragging but my classes kick ass & they're only paying like $700 for a whole term of it! a good dinner out with a date is gonna cost you what, a 1/7 of that? true that a student has to handle it right; when I go teach in a hour or so I'm gonna see some dead eyes that remind me that some of these kids aren't getting anything out of this, & that it's their fault (b/c after only a week I can assure you I'm not fucking up yet).

euler is your school increasing enrollment at all?

in general in education as in all else, poverty's the issue, esp. in early childhood years; by college we can add value to people's already-in-place skills but we can't create those skills from scratch; only a parent or a community can do that.

But there's a way to 'correct' for some of those skills by offering fair support services. This is equitable, and right. Not everybody comes to college w/ the same background, but college could – potentially - close the gap between the struggling kids and the are-gonna-do-well-no-matter-what types. But I'm not even sure that 4-year college is the right answer, anyway, so maybe this is a moot point?

attendance is at a high this year but the prez/board of regents is keeping it at more or less stable levels, so we're only about 500 students up this year iirc

my #s seem a bit down wait-list-wise but my classes are all full so things seem ok

I'm not sure that four-year college is right for those students either, but I think a lot of the problem is that while the "go to college & ~find~ yourself" is great for upper-middle-class kids, I don't think it suits others so well.

fwiw I feel the same way about the sexual revolution

jeez I didn't find myself until about four years after college

also before you people tell me to get to work

a) I've got the stomach flu pretty wicked right now
b) taught 3 hrs yesterday & gonna do it again for an hour today
c) was an awesome Pete Sampras at the US Open moment yesterday, hoping to play like a champion again today

I thought you were tenured? it should be ilx+tennis 24/7 now

wait maybe some sleeping...and eating

remy otm - there is a huge disparity in the quality of education that a student can potentially get before college.

this article instantly reminded me of a nearly identical piece in Time Magazine from the early 90s about Generation X - over-educated, aimless, without economic prospects, debt-ridden, unlikely to scale the economic heights of their forebears, etc. I wonder if that is online somewhere...

haha yeah tenure but like Sampras I wanna keep rising high

yeah the thing is 'aimless college grads' has always been 'a thing', but right now we're in an economic downturn that's not comparable to anything else post-great depression xp

I guess part of what I'm getting at is that for students who require special accommodations, have either documented or undocumented LDs, speak mediocre English, need to take a slower, non-traditional (or interrupted) path through schools, or require additional mentorship or counseling, the the community college and state school system has often been welcoming, empowering and viable. Whether it's true or not, these students aren't perceiving the same help/options in these schools b/c of a one size fits all approach that now include a lot of more traditional students who need less in the way of support. For the school's bottom line, this is a good thing: accommodations cost money, and customarily the students who require them have a lower earning potential (as a group) than the students who don't, so why not focus on the most likely-to-be-successful students?

ah here it is

xp

"Reason: America needs them. Today's young adults are so scarce that their numbers could result in severe labor shortages in the coming decade."

yeah this part doesn't come up in many articles today

boomers kids are their own demographic bump, gen x was the lack of one

What worries parents, teachers and employers is that the latest crop of adults wants to postpone growing up. At a time when they should be graduating, entering the work force and starting families of their own, the twentysomething crowd is balking at those rites of passage. A prime reason is their recognition that the American Dream is much tougher to achieve after years of housing-price inflation and stagnant wages. Householders under the age of 25 were the only group during the 1980s to suffer a drop in income, a decline of 10%. One result: fully 75% of young males 18 to 24 years old are still living at home, the largest proportion since the Great Depression.

In a TIME/CNN poll of 18- to 29-year-olds, 65% of those surveyed agreed it will be harder for their group to live as comfortably as previous generations. While the majority of today's young adults think they have a strong chance of finding a well-paying and interesting job, 69% believe they will have more difficulty buying a house, and 52% say they will have less leisure time than their predecessors. Asked to describe their generation, 53% said the group is worried about the future.

69% believe they will have more difficulty buying a house, and 52% say they will have less leisure time than their predecessors.

that much turned out to be true!

Because they are fewer in number, today's young adults have the power to wreak havoc in the workplace. Companies are discovering that to win the best talent, they must cater to a young work force that is considered overly sensitive at best and lazy at worst. During the next several years, employers will have to double their recruiting efforts. According to American Demographics, the pool of entry-level workers 16 to 24 will shrink about 500,000 a year through 1995, to 21 million. These youngsters are starting to use their bargaining power to get more of what they feel is coming to them. They want flexibility, access to decision making and a return to the sacredness of work-free weekends. "I want a work environment concerned about my personal growth," says Jennifer Peters, 22, one of the youngest candidates ever to be admitted to the State Bar of California. "I don't want to go to work and feel I'll be burned out two or three years down the road."

seems a little different to me!

Euler what is your field?

yeah sure there are differences - I haven't read the article in 20 years fwiw

gen x: lazy
millennials: overeducated, prob a little lazy, mostly just fucked

that article feels more like "aimless 20 somethings not sure of what they want to do", today's version of "aimless 20 somethings WANT to do something but finding all doors shut"

yeah as far as I can tell In This Economy™ what used to be entry-level jobs all advertise as requiring 3 years experience. I somehow have gotten a few interviews anyway but every time one peters out I just get less interested in applying for more programming jobs and more interested in killing time until grad school.

I'm a phil-ah-soh-pher

which btw shouldn't be conflated with "the liberal arts" b/c our students aren't usually the dreamy-wanna-write-a-story types, rather they're the mass debater types & go on to do analytic work & typically get pretty well paid (unless they go to grad school obv)

you mean @ your school or philosophy majors in general

Not really involved in the discussion but here's a link that might be of interest - http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/08/31/historical-trends-in-college-tuition/

The linked post about the retained value of a college degree is also worth a look.

both xp unless we're talking continental philosophers w/ all that crit theory bullshit & that's just dreamy-wanna-write-a-story stuff that isn't gonna get you anywhere

obv I am a pawn of the status quo

I dunno I think their prospects aren't much different from english majors or whatever, they just have a higher tendency to go to law school

if I owned 'generic business' I would totally hire a bunch of philosophy majors tho, seems like an undervalued asset (as long as I didn't have to talk to them)

what if 'generic business' was a 'medicinal marijuana shop'

fwiw philosophy majors rank in the top three nationally on the LSAT, GMAT and GRE pretty much yearly; our only competition is physics & math iirc

xp lol

Got turned down for a job I had two interviews for today. FUCK THIS SHIT.

xps to Euler: see I don't like the idea of denigrating "the liberal arts" as a thing, I legitimately believe that the liberal arts (including liberal study of the sciences) are the foundation of a democratic society; this is why high school is at least in part a weird mini liberal arts education. College as a job-training-and-credentialing exercise is just going to become a worse and worse value proposition (though it honestly isn't now, as college grads are still outperforming non-college-grads in the job market, modulo debt I guess), especially because the academy moves so slowly that by the time it has figured out how to prepare students for the economy of 2011 it'll be 2038.

a hoy hoy: YEAH NO KIDDIN

this is why high school is at least in part a weird mini liberal arts education it's becoming less of this all the time

yeah I would like to see more discussion of the value of a liberal arts education itt. think a lot of ppl (though not all) who post to ILX prob have a degree in the liberal arts and went to liberal arts colleges?

did anybody actually have 'shop class' in high school?

my hs had it, I didn't take it

^^^we did and I managed to studiously avoid all of them

we also had an auto-repair type class, I think

the stuff I learned in my hs journalism class - particularly how to write, use a computer, and lay things out - came in much handier professionally than anything I learned in college, really. but liberal arts degrees/colleges are not really about learning a specific subject matter imho, they're about training your mind to think critically and work in different contexts.

I would definitely be making more money in the same industry I'm in now if I'd gotten an engineering degree, but I always hated math.

school is awful - full of false promises and useless work
memorization and paper achievements
any kind of real sense of desires to learn or create are put to the side

yeah 'critical thinking' is the rote response to people who question the value of a liberal arts education

I'm still trying to think through the true value of the ability to 'think critically' in the job market

dayo it was called the vocational wing in my hs

also folks, this is my line of work and i have a lot of relevant things to say, but i would really rather not discuss it publicly for a variety of reasons

xp - critical thinking is REALLY IMPORTANT esp if you don't have very good critical thinking skills

did anybody actually have 'shop class' in high school?

Was v sad when I had to give up woodshop b/c there was no room for it in the college-prep curriculum. It was down to shop or band, and marching band won.

Just think, I could have grown up to be a stoner!

I tend to take Dewey's line about the value of a liberal-arts-education in creating & nourishing a populace able to handle democracy

+ DFW's take in his Kenyon graduation address

oh I totally agree that critical thinking is implicitly and in and of itself a valuable skill, LL - but that's not how all employers see it

The biggest problem we face is not financial illiteracy. It is compound interest.

In the coming decades, the returns on 401(k) plans are expected to fall by half. According to an analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a drop in stock market returns of just 2 percentage points means a 25-year-old would have to contribute more than double the amount to her retirement savings that a boomer did. Oh, and she’ll have to do it on lower wages.

I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.

I don't understand this. I've recently begun working at a Portuguese callcenter. This is not the best job in the world, it's probably pretty low in the hierarchy of jobs in Europe, wage is lower than any job in Denmark, but it's steady, and I'd never think to spend half my income on rent. This guy has enough experience and network to get a "highline" article on huffpost but he's unable to land a steady job?

Dunno, maybe things are just terrible in the US.

The rent situation here depends very much on where you live. Even the outskirts of popular cities can be expensive.

I'd never think to spend half my income on rent.

congratulations?

Average take-home pay in the UK is something like £1700. Average rent is something like £850-£900. In London that is £2200 and £1600 respectively.

Obvs that includes rent on multi-occupier properties as well but I’d be surprised if anyone other than the fairly wealthy renting in the south of England is living on their own and spending much less than half their income on accommodation.

Twenty years ago I was living on $18K a year but my rent (apartment with a couple of roommates, suburb of a popular city) was just under $300 a month, so $800 a month for the whole place. Just looked on Zillow and apartments of similar size in my old neighborhood are now renting for $2500 and up. So yeah, people who live there are spending half their income on rent unless they've got a lot of income for a young person.

if i were paying the rent on the one bedroom apartment i share with my wife by myself i would be paying 50 percent of my wages on rent + utilities. my apartment is a coupe of hundred dollars cheaper than the average one bedroom in the city, i have a 9-5 office job at a university.

good story, thanks whenuweremine.

This guy has enough experience and network to get a "highline" article on huffpost but he's unable to land a steady job?

yup!

lol yes exactly

nothing matters

with a little luck tho the huffpo check'll come by easter

Dunno, maybe things are just terrible in the US.

Wait til you hear about our healthcare system...

sry to hear about crazy rent everybody, that's terrible!

just to clarify I rent a very small room and spend about 25% of my income on this - renting an apartment on my own would easily cost 50% of my income (so I don't, would be nice tho)

btw I know it's hard to come by steady jobs in journalism, I was suggesting that with the author's skillset it would seem he'd be able to land a different kind of job, pretty sure he could have my job if he applied

anyway, I don't mean to dismiss issues of poverty in the US, just found the author's tone... a bit much. Iirc pay gap and poverty issues have a terrible racial and gender slant, something about his apocalyptical victim narrative abt college educated millenials seems off to me. Not sure how trustworthy the US Census Bureau is but general outline in this article seems realistic to me https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493751949/census-bureau-poverty-rate-down-median-incomes-up

Hobbes is from Seattle where the average rent in commuting distance on a 1br apartment is $2000. To hit the 25% mark, after federal taxes, etc, you’d need to earn $120k - of course he would still need to pay for healthcare, etc, which we do not. idk what the ratio of millennials to $120k jobs in Seattle is.

Renting a room, sharing a house, etc are all solutions to existing in a big city but the broader point about living in those conditions being a bar on a transition to doing ‘adult’ things like getting married, having a family...buying a table?…, etc is true. Living a perpetual student lifestyle is great if you enjoy it but generational expectations are being radically redefined.

Whiny millennials have access to the public ear in a much more obvious way than the people who bear the greatest burden of poverty but the contraction of the traditional middle class and expansion of paycheque-to-paycheque living aren’t things that we should be glossing over because other people have it worse.

French owners are allowed by law to avoid renting to you unless the rent is at most 1/3 of your income, and in practice they take advantage of this, because French law makes it hard to kick someone out when they can't pay. so when we moved here we had to live 1h20 by train from the city. granted, we are a family of 5, and so need a bit of space (~70 m^2 works) but yeah, living in the city was impossible then.

now we live in the city because we got social housing (being gov employee with a long commute & big family got us priority). but to qualify for this *highly* subsidized apartment my salary still had to meet the 1/3 threshold and my starting salary did not, so we had to wait a year and a half to be eligible for social housing.

living in the countryside & commuting wasn't that bad because I picked a town where I could commute by train (we didn't need a car bc French villages are compact for daily life)(and half my transport costs were paid by my employer, by law). USA countryside doesn't permit this, so you're talking long car commutes there if you're not in the city.

Accounting for inflation, I spend twice as much a year on a train ticket as my (poor, immigrant) father spent on renting a two bedroom Victorian flat with a huge garden in central London in the eighties. The flat would rent for a minimum of £36k-£40k a year now. And I’m lucky! I own a house!

What was his internet speeds like

those are very good points ShariVari, thanks

The ratio of Millennials to $120k salaries in Seattle is heavily influenced by the proliferation of software developers working for Amazon et alia. Which is to say there’s a sizable supply of kids willing to rent a studio for $2000.

every generation has seemed to rationalize selling out their potential and playing dumb in exchange for hypothetical material security, not just millenials, the poor kids

When you say something like that

Do you ever I mean ask

Assuming it even makes any sense as a statement never mind that it's accurate let's just assume in your head this is a coherent sentence and also a fact

Assuming that and don't forget you just made an ass out of u and ming then do you ever ask yourself why each generation does this thing you think they do

U ok hun

I feel like that highline article dilutes its own argument by ultimately turning out to be about every bunch of Americans who ever graduated college during a major recession.

eh i'll take it, all that damn "milleniums are the worst" clickbait trash needs to be countered a little bit

U ok hun

― But doctor, I am Camille Paglia (Bananaman Begins), Monday, 18 December 2017 01:21 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Read it aloud babes it might make more sense if it doesn't that's cool too x

yeah average rent is like 2 K in vancouver now, it's fucking bunk. also same as jim i'm in a decent rent sitch but it's easy to put half the cheque towards rent

I live in a pretty small basement apt in Toronto and I spend about 40% of my take-home on rent.

ah, here, this is the thread

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/us/college-admissions-cheating-scandal.html

Ray Liotta [V/O]: https://t.co/LR71RqUMIx

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) March 12, 2019

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-millennialgen-z-strategy

I’ve written extensively about student loans, and the broken state of the student loan forgiveness program, here. That piece was the first thing I wrote after the original millennial burnout article, because it was the most tangible expression of the gap between what millennials were told their future would look like, if only they worked hard enough, and the lived, post-Recession reality. To understand millennial burnout, you can’t just understand the amount of student loans we’re carrying; you have to understand what they feel like. And if and when you understand that, it’s incredibly straightforward to see why so many support Sanders and Warren.

Back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, middle-class boomers and young Gen-Xers were faced with the reality that their parents’ broadly stable middle-class existence would not necessarily pass down to them. The so-called Golden Age of American Capitalism had lasted just long enough that those who grew up under it could believe that it might last forever. They responded to the decline in stable middle class jobs in a number of ways: many of them, too, went to college, but because public institution funding had yet to be gutted by tax cuts, it cost much, much, much less. (Cue: your boomer uncle who loves to tell you he worked his way through college and graduated without loans).

But as Barbara Ehrenreich persuasively argues in Fear of Falling, they responded by turning decisively inward: how can I do whatever is possible to help me and mine?

in hindsight, this was all very predictable. if the capitalist class wanted to keep the american population on board with their system, they should have allowed them to be part of it, not puffed them up with expectations and then let out the air.

it doesn't seem like they ever act in their long term class interests, honestly. their whole model relies on the american consumer, yet they are always trying to chip away at people's power to buy and invest.

Introspective Twitter thread untangling conflicted feelings about financial dependence on his parents:

a few days ago i took a medium dose of acid and wrote for several hours straight and admitted some things to myself, mostly about money

let's start here: last august my mom gave me $100,000 for my birthday. i resented her for this and also suppressed the resentment

— Magnificent Adult Baby (@QiaochuYuan) July 15, 2021

My heart breaks for him for receiving a gift of $32k more than the median household income of an American family.

“A few days ago I took a medium dose of acid and wrote for several hours…” pic.twitter.com/jKRUx9bC1c

— Bimböcalan (@baddielaire) July 16, 2021

let's start here: ask your mom for another $100K, then donate it all directly to people via mutual aid. then christ will come back and you will reign for 100,000 money years

http://files.pensadorcristao.webnode.com.br/system_preview_detail_200000056-6a2606a9fc/mike-murdock.jpg