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While you Gen Yers are bridling at your rep as “trophy kids,” overpraised for your potential, baby boomers got a less than flattering epithet from Walter Kirn this weekend: “Aptocrats,” he calls the strivers now at the pinnacles of success and influence. In his “Way We Live Now” column in Sunday’s Times, he makes a compelling case that it’s high time to revise America’s aptitude-test-obsessed meritocratic system—but I’m not sure he’s noticed how much it’s already changed. Kids these days—yes, those maligned Gen Yers—have to cough up lots of achievement credentials, not just high SAT scores (and that “a” hasn’t stood for aptitude for a long time now), to get into competitive colleges: APs, extracurriculars, community service, essays with “passion.”
Now, you might well ask whether this revised meritocratic rigamarole is just another way to put a premium on “high-level baloney,” as Kirn calls the puzzle-solving, teacher-pleasing traits of good test-takers. Or can it perhaps give a better inkling of “determination and courage,” which I agree are underrated ingredients of success? The answer is that it probably does some of both: It’s a gauntlet that rewards industrious commitment and glib, resume-enhancing savvy.
As for courage, it seems new graduates will have to learn that as they enter the recessionary real world. There they will discover right away what many of their elders have yet to comprehend—and what the notion of a fine-tuned meritocracy obscures: that luck, never mind talent or some studiously calibrated measure of merit, inevitably plays a big role in getting to the top, or failing to.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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In the Wall Street Journal, my onetime sparring partner Kay Hymowitz argues that the discussion over the meltdown of white, middle-class marriage comes at a time when white, middle class marriages are particularly likely to last; the divorce rate for college-educated women is remarkably low. And despite the fact that her piece includes a sarcastic shoutout to Double X, I think she is mostly right. For all the talk of desperately bored empty nesters, marital satisfaction generally suffers when kids come along and rises when kids leave. The median age of first divorce for women is 29, not 59; it seems that the arrival of children is more likely to challenge a marriage than their sudden disappearance.
Oddly, Hymowitz also insists that marriage is “suffering a full-scale crisis of consumer confidence” among this same subgroup, and reminds us that “in any crisis, people tend to panic.” In defense of this claim she cites the Sandra Tsing Loh's piece in the Atlantic, our discussion, John Edwards, and Mark Sanford. (The Gosselins, surely more powerful cultural actors than any of the former, go unmentioned.) So which is it? Is the institution of marriage safe and stable or in such a precarious position that a single excitable governor can destroy it forever?
I just don't see anyone panicking. If unfaithful politicians could convince us to give up on long-term partnerships, we’d have stopped marrying long ago, and I have serious trouble believing that an Atlantic feature can successfuly undermine Americans' particularly romantic view of the practice. Every relevant survey I’ve seen indicates that the vast majority of Millenials aspire to marriage someday, perhaps even more so than the previous generation. That a small number of people are trying to temper and qualify the romantic mythos of longterm pairbonding hardly amounts to a crisis. Or news.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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That's a good market-driven thesis, Jess, for why Gen Y-ers have a reputation for acting entitled in the workplace: They've been demanding because they could be. Here's another way in which your mid-20s peers are luckier than their younger siblings and friends who are graduating from college right now. According to a study by economist Lisa Kahn of the Yale School of Management, graduating during a downturn has long-term bad consequences. "They include lower earnings, a slower climb up the occupational ladder and a widening gap between the least- and most-successful grads," according to this write up in the Wall Street Journal. Kahn says that the "damage can linger up to 15 years." Her data comes from the mid 1980s and looks only at the wages of white men. I wonder if there's any reason to think it might look different for women or minorities. I can't think of one. In any case, the findings suggest, alas, that the many recent grads who wrote to me a few months ago about their fears of being stuck in the economic doldrums semi-permanently have cause to worry.
I was just talking to a friend of mine whose daughter is home after graduating from college and seems to want only to watch bad movies, read trashy books, and see her friends. My friend, not surprisingly, was finding this maddening. Maybe the recession means she should be more patient. It's not that her daughter is lazy: It's that her whole age group is screwed! Or maybe Kahn's research in fact should be read as a tough love manual, because the 22-year-olds who are lost now will stay lost.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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The New York Times style piece about entitled millennials who are left without internships, jobs, and summer experiences to pad their résumés bothered me, too, Jess. In particular it was the piece’s use of what has become the go-to example of why we’re just such demanding brats: Everyone gets a trophy! Books like Not Everyone Gets a Trophy and The Trophy Kids Grow Up, whose author was quoted in the NYT article, capitalize on the image. But much as I hate to bust a cliché, the expression “trophy kids” misses a rather important point: It sucks to get one of those participation trophies.
I unwillingly played most of the suburban-kid sports (my poor eye-hand coordination, pathetic stamina, and whiny insistence that I’d rather be reading didn’t exactly endear me to my teammates) and over the years gathered quite a collection of these cheap plastic trophies. Every time I looked at them, I felt embarrassed. They were reminders of my ineptitude, because I knew I didn’t earn them. No young athlete with any sense of perspective would mistake those trophies for genuine celebrations of accomplishment. My classmates and I joked about them; we rolled our eyes when they were passed out at end-of-season pizza parties.
Perhaps some young children are genuinely proud of their participation trophies (and they aren’t limited to the sports world—I once received a small participation medal from a science fair). But for the most part, these trophies, which trend pieces hold up as the point when my generation went wrong, are one big joke to Generation Y.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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The New York Times had an article in its style section yesterday about college students' bleak prospects for employment this summer. The content is entirely unsurprising: We're in a recession where jobs are drying up for everyone. What interested me in this article was the 180 that experts are making on their previous assumptions about Generation Y:
“Things have changed drastically,” said Ron Alsop, author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, a book that only last year portrayed young workers as entitled and in a hurry. “It has to be a huge wake-up call for this generation.”
For a while now, Generation Y has been portrayed as a bunch of sneaker-wearing lazybones who skateboard to the office and demand a four-day work week. But I would argue that the way Gen-Y workers used to behave had nothing to do with indulgent parents who told us we were infallible. The way young workers behaved in the first half of the decade had everything to do with the economy. In the mid-aughts, people of all ages were being entitled and demanding of their employers ... because they could be. In a market where jobs are abundant, it's logical for workers to try to get the most perks possible—whether or not their Mommies told them they were special.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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