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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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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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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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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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I agree with you, Jess, that the poor job and internship prospects for today’s college students are more about the underperforming economy than an over-supply of participation trophies, or any other Gen-Y generalizations on which people like to pin such trends. But I disagree that Gen-Yers’ (that is to say, “our”) entitlement is purely economy-driven. Following your theory, that sense of privilege should diminish with the foundering economy. That would mean that our peers, many of whom are getting laid off or fear they soon will be, should right about now be tossing aside dreams of jobs that let us save the world and stay intellectually stimulated all day every day—all while wearing jeans and working from home when we feel like it!—and settling for whatever jobs we can get. Instead, we’re going to grad school.
The idea that young people choose to weather tough economic times in the safety of university libraries is nothing new. What’s different this time around is the opportunity costs that we Gen-Yers are all but ignoring when we choose the post-bac path. Education is expensive—much more so that it was for our parents, having gone up at more than twice the rate of inflation over the past two decades. The federal income-based repayment plan that kicked in this month underscores how bad the student loan trap has gotten. People are rejoicing over a plan that calculates what you owe each month based on what you make (a proposal so reasonable, it’s shocking it took this long) and lets you off the hook after 25 years (right when you’re gearing up to put your own kids through school).
That’s better, sure, but still pretty bad. Even with the new repayment plan, which only applies to federal loans, a two-year master’s degree could mean an entire adulthood of paying off loans. You’ll still probably have private loans on top of the federal ones, and ever-growing interest on both. The IBR plan reduces your monthly payments, but sticks you with up to 25 years of hacking away at your debt (which Smart Money estimates as $50,000 for the average grad school grad) before the government steps in and clears you of the rest. Oh, but you’ll still have to pay taxes on what was forgiven. To make matters worse, all that debt can hurt your employment chances. And in careers where a master’s degree doesn’t even do you much good, income-wise (like, say, mine), the salary you didn’t get while you were a student combined with the salary increase you won’t get for having been one are two more reasons not to take the higher-higher ed road.
Still, 20-somethings are turning to grad school as some great liberating option. Workplace got you down? Get another degree! You deserve it! In some cases, it will pay off. But often, it seems like one more reflection of that sense of invincibility and entitlement that our generation is often accused of having: indulge in education now; hope those pesky responsibilities that come with it don’t find us later.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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Sam, your post on Gen Y's educational entitlement sounded eerily like a schpeel that plays through my mind every morning. As you know, I am a grad student getting a master's degree in your field. Government and private loans, check; no more earning potential with my degree than without it, check; denial—not really. I went back to school last fall for a specific purpose: to make up for what I, one of those Gen Y strivers, didn't get out of my supposedly idyllic undergraduate education.
Like Walter Kirn, whose Sunday New York Times Magazine piece sparked this discussion, I went to Princeton. Overall, it's a wonderful place. The problem is that I didn't approach it with appropriate wonder. Why? The truth is that after years as one of those aptocrat kids Kirn wrote about, I was totally burned out. Some people seem to emerge from the quest for that single, all-validating prize, the Ivy League (or equivalent) admission, hungry for the intellectual challenges of undergraduate life. I, for one, was exhausted. Between the AP courses, volunteer work, essay contests, and academic competitions, I averaged five hours of sleep a night in high school. When I was a senior, I looked so run-down that a rumor went around my small Catholic school that I was On Drugs. I was a machine.
When Princeton accepted my carefully crafted early decision application, I was over the moon—for a few days. But a week later, I found myself lying in my dry bathtub in my school uniform with the sense that I had never once considered what I really wanted or enjoyed, never even allowed myself to ask that question. I'd spent years proving myself—but proving what exactly?
I got to college the following fall not motivated to achieve much of anything. I didn't see the point. When a book or idea excited me, instead of pursuing it with the enthusiasm the admission committee signed me on for, I resisted. I'd learned what hard work, even on things you cared about, earned you: an overwhelming sense of emptiness.
As a result of my freshman year malaise, both the academic abilities that had once been second nature to me and my sense of myself as a go-getter, so long my primary source of self-worth, atrophied. A bout with anorexia, a subsequent year off, and the time I spent at my alma mater's infamous eating clubs didn't help.
So for me graduate school is the best investment I could have made this year, despite the recession. I entered what is probably the most wonderfully nerdy journalism program on the planet to make up for lost time—intellectual and personal. It's self-indulgent and financially terrifying, but I chose it knowing what I was getting into. And the price is nothing compared to what my years in the aptocracy cost me.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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Susannah Jacob meant to write a humorous account of her failures as an IHOP waitress. Instead, she offered yet more fodder for our “entitled generation” conversation, and revealed herself, intentionally or not, as being unable—or unwilling—to succeed at one of today’s most elusive goals: an actual, if unglamorous, job.
Jacobs lives in an affluent Dallas suburb. She’s heading to college in the fall. She doesn’t, by her own admission, “need the paycheck.” And it’s clear that she thinks it’s funny that someone like her can’t succeed at a job that her trainer, Suzanne, an immigrant ex-con, a former drug addict, and a multiple divorcee, is not only good at, but takes pride in. This young scion of the upper middle class just can’t do it. “Waiting on tables, it seemed, violated my very constitution.”
If you’re not wincing enough already, the rest of the essay—intended as a send-up of her failures (putting powdered sugar on hamburgers, breaking things, and splashing hot coffee)—stands out mostly for the throw-away descriptions of those she’s condescending to work with and wait on. A tattooed family “even manage[s] somehow to smell British,” a baby unlucky enough to have a family who eats at a major chain “slouch[es] on his mother’s lap.”
There’s no dramatic turn-around; no Shop Class as Soulcraft realization that Suzanne the self-professed “damn good waitress” has a valuable, un-outsource-able skill set, no admission that any job worth doing is worth doing well. Instead, drinks are spilled, pancakes are ruined, and the writer ... quits. And however relieved she thinks her mid-shift departure made her manager, it left this reader, a parent and a veteran of plenty of service jobs, fuming.
Photograph by Getty Images.
