A new study by Richard Stettersten of Oregon State University and Barbara Ray of Hired Pen, Inc., entitled What’s Going on with Young People Today?: The Long and Twisting Path to Adulthood, reports that young adults in 2005—including those with a college education—were not doing as well as their baby-boomer parents who reached adulthood in the 1960′s and 1970′s. In fact, the study suggests that in their pathway toward establishing independence, today’s young people more closely resemble their grandparents and great-grandparents than their prosperous boomer parents who enjoyed high-paying and secure jobs during the period of strong economic growth following World War II. Like young adults of the early 1900′s, today’s young adults are slow to leave their family homes and start families of their own, although in the 1900′s the lingering child was likely to participate in supporting his parents, as opposed to today’s lingering child who is likely to be supported by his or her parents. It is for good reason that this generation is known as the boomerang generation.
There have been lots of articles about boomerang children, but what makes this study unique is its finding that today’s college educated young adults do not enjoy the same earning power as did their boomer parents in the 1960s and 1970s. The study reports that college educated men earned about $3,500 less per year in 2002 than did their equally-educated counterparts in 1975 (earnings were adjusted for inflation). Moreover, in every single group except those with graduate-level education, the proportion of people earning below the poverty level in 2002 was greater than it was in 1975. College educated or not, it would appear that our children are falling behind in earned wages, not to mention the additional pinch they will soon feel as more of their earnings are diverted from their pocket to the Treasury. After all, it is they who will be required to repay the debt generated by our current spending spree, not to mention all of those generous Social Security and health-care benefits that the boomers have arranged for themselves.
The findings of this study also suggest that the widely cited Bureau of Labor Statistic’s 2002 study, The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings, is likely to be dead wrong in its conclusions. While that study projected the future earnings of young people based on the actual earnings of their elders, we now know that the experience of the boomers is in no way predictive of what lies ahead for the boomerangers. What we do know is that an aging population will cost us lots of money, and yet the people paying the bills will never enjoy the earning potential or financial security that was enjoyed by the very people they are now being asked to support.
In light of this report, one wonders how the administration can even ponder new regulations that seek to define what constitutes gainful employment for some college graduates. During this time of double-digit unemployment, I would argue that any job can be considered gainful employment when compared to the alternative. If we want to ensure a high-paying job for every college graduate, then we will be forced to ration enrollment opportunities based on the current and predicted job market. The problem with that approach, however, is that we have never been correct in our past predictions. Consider the teacher surpluses we are experiencing, despite the fact that we still offer loan-forgiveness programs based on earlier projections of vast teacher shortages. Instead, we need to hold students to high standards, understand that not all will meet those standards and graduate, and help students compete for the jobs that exist—while remaining adaptable and flexible to pursue other opportunities as well. While education is good, and an educated population might correlate with strong economic performance, a saturated employment market leads to depressed wages and unemployment, which serves employers but not employees.
Government officials on both sides of the aisle are telling students that they must go to college to be successful in life—that we are all college material (isn’t Lake Wobegon wonderful?). Government officials are making inflated promises about the financial rewards of a college education. Government officials are coercing colleges and universities to essentially push students through in order to meet arbitrary standards for retention and graduation rates. Government officials are the ones who decided to cash in on student and parent borrowers by charging them obscene, above-market rates on their federal college loans. So it seems to me that government officials should be held accountable for ensuring that all of those college graduates have access to the high-paying jobs they sought, have earned, were promised and will need to repay their federal student loans. It plays well at the polls to promise young people a chance to go to college. This November, I have a funny feeling that the voters will show their interest in the even more important promise of a secure, well-paying job, commensurate with the educational credentials they were told to acquire.
9 Responses to Straddling 2 Centuries
_perplexed_ - April 29, 2010 at 6:09 pm
The “generous Social Security and health-care benefits” (at least the ones I’m hoping are still in place in a few years)were “arranged” by the greatest generation, not the boomers, but guess which is more fun to bash.
rbannist - April 30, 2010 at 1:26 am
The Social Security Administration was established in 1935 as part of FDR’s massive social programs to ease the suffering of the great depression. As such, those who would have been 21 years old on the Day of Infamy in 1941 which drew the US in to WWII would have only been 15. Members of Congress would have been at least in their 30′s and mostly older.Medicare came in 1965 as part of LBJ’s Great Society. The Great Generation was approaching the peak of its political power at that point.The point not made well here is that the boomers and Gen-X’ers, at least the boomers from 1954 forward who did not have the specter of Viet Nam, are as groups extremely materialistic, self-centered, and given to conspicuous consumption today with little regard for the payback that comes in the future. Of course, distinguishing genertions is an arbitrary designation. Some would consider 1964 more or less the end of baby boomers for after that point, the baby boom was over. However, generational values for those born in the early sixties are different from boomers from 1947-1953 who were part of the “Woodstock” generation, the flower children, the naive idealists. Regardless, baby boomers of all stripes and the X gang were largely provided with an amazing high standard of living and apart from those who served in Vietnam, rather spoiled by previous generational standards.Understanding the mentality of these generations does help us understand the plight of the millenium babies. Perhaps the older boomers became “now” focused thinking tomorrow we all die with the notion of the Cold War and nuclear destruction hovering in the background. Live it up for tomorrow we all may die. Gen X never knew Viet Nam, Cuban Missile Crisis, the erection of the Berlin Wall. The polarities of the Cold War were fading away as they came of age. They’ve lived in a world of such abundance, so little pressure, nothing much to do but live it up and expect such lucious excess would last forever. Ah, but the last generations of the 1900′s have run up such a huge tab in so many ways, it’s hard to picture how future generations won’t pay a dear price as a result.These two generations are also often quite anti-intellectual. Knoweledge for knowledge sake and the credo of a liberal arts ideal are lost upon generations who want immediate tangible rewards. Having challenged the aging process, refusing to accept aging shooting up with Botox, getting eye and face jobs, and other such vanities.. in many ways never becoming adults or assuming the responsibilities of adulthood the “Great Generation” did, is it any wonder the kids of the “me” generations are so screwed up and prone to stay at home. By this writer’s count, they are the third generation to have trouble with personal responsibility. Sadly, the last generation who valued it is dying off by the thousands each day.Right now, the Baby Boomers are becoming the senior generation. God help us. (I was born in 1953 so I plead guilty to much of it.)
22228715 - April 30, 2010 at 7:33 am
It seems to me that the writers are struggling with lacking sense of normal. Is the Boomer youth normal, and all others measured against it? Or was the GI generation normal, and subsequent (or previous) generations more or less than by comparison? (Gen Xers, sorry, but no matter how successful you become at infusing reality, pragmatism, and clean up operations into society through your own work or the raising of Millennials and the next generation, you will probably never be a candidate for a norming anchor. Millennials, you have a better shot when the Boomers die off.) Really, historically, it’s hard to justify painting any one generation as the standard by which all others should be measured.
11135346 - April 30, 2010 at 10:02 am
Arghh!We (the baby boomer generation) have spent most of our lives “fully actualizing our potentials” instead of preparing for future generations… and now we expect the federal government to somehow bail us out from the consequences?!Good luck with that.
jffoster - May 2, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Absent in all this is any reference to the sometimes called “Silent Generation” — the children of the older “Greatest” and younger siblings of the Younger ones — too young to have gone to WW II but older than the Baby Boomers, old enough to remember troop trains, rationing, the Berlin Air Lift, and the Korean “Conflict”.
dnewton137 - May 3, 2010 at 10:32 am
As a member of the “Silent Generation” correctly noted by “jffoster,” let me add a point to this interesting debate. (I sometimes identify my generation as the one which kept the wheels of our nation turning while the Baby Boomers were sowing their wild oats.)One of the usually unmentioned factors in the great retirement issue is the standard accepted retirement age, sixty-five. It seems to have become universally accepted as something comparable to a constant of nature, like the velocity of light. But it is instructive to consider how that standard age originated.Contrary to common American belief, social security systems were not invented in the U.S. during the Roosevelt Administration. The first such system was created by the Kingdom of Prussia in the late nineteenth century, when Otto von Bismarck was Chancellor. The driver then was the need to provide support for the workers of the new industrial economy when they retired. The Prussians calculated what should be the official retirement age given the mean lifetime of its workers and the financial resources then available. The result was 65. With that retirement age, Prussian workers could be counted on to die before the money ran out.Given what has happened to mean life times in the subsequent century, it is perfectly obvious that we need to raise our official retirement age. Let the boomers continue working and paying taxes until, say eighty, and then go on the Social Security dole until they expire.
marka - May 3, 2010 at 11:53 am
Reading FDR’s comments on the Social Security measures of the ’30s, I was struck by his insistence that all these measures were -temporary- because core American values rely on individual initiative and responsibility, not on government handouts! Like the ‘temporary’ school buildings that have lasted decades longer than ‘planned’ … . The challenges presented by our continued optimistic projections are coming due: we fail to abandon ‘temporary’ measures, and they take on lives of their own, becoming entitlement ‘rights.’ All premised on take now, pay later … which is another way of saying we’ll let the next generation(s) pay.The 2d point – that we can’t all be ‘fully’ employed in college graduate jobs (who will pick up trash, build & maintain buildings, drive taxis & buses, cook, serve & wash dishes … ) – is also well taken. It sets up a double-whammy: if you do extend your entry into the workforce by delaying exit from schooling, what jobs will await you?; and if you don’t, somehow you are not a complete human being, and you are being exploited. Either way, we are setting people up for failure.I’m growing tired of all this false ‘hope’ and irrational exuberance about a fairy land where everyone is above average, college educated, and well-employed, where someone else continues to pay for entitlements …sigh
macheath - May 3, 2010 at 1:15 pm
How did the comments (and the original blog) about stagnant wages and employment difficulties (in the greatest recession since the Great Depression) become a place to moan about Social Security and entitlements? That isn’t what’s causing either the long-term real income problem (which starts in the mid-1970s) or the current lack of jobs (which stems from the infection of the financial crisis, caused by lack of adequate regulation, into the real economy).There are good jobs that don’t require a four-year degree, and there’s a lot of good work on them. The four-year degree is indeed oversold, but it is hard to get Americans to refocus. The recent emphasis on community colleges and “stackable credentials” with meaningful certification that employers value is one good trend. See the great work of the Workforce Alliance (http://www.workforcealliance.org/) , with their analyses of “middle skill” jobs and their call for all students to have at least one year of meaningful post-high school training. More job growth would come at this point from a larger and much-needed second round of federal stimulus.But Social Security isn’t really in trouble, and Medicare (which is) is a health care cost problem that afflicts the private as well as the government sector. Entitlements aren’t causing stagnant wage growth for the last three decades, nor the lack of current jobs for college graduates (and everyone else).
rbannist - May 4, 2010 at 1:09 am
There are plenty of people making money hand over fist who never went to college, but college is a requirement (whether truly necessary or in some cases not) for lots of the “higher crust” jobs.I would question is there a demand for the kinds of jobs for which college is required and are there not enough adequately qualified grads to fill those positions? IF that is the case, then there is an issue that needs to be worked on. Likewise, are there enough grads well qualified ready to move up and out (as in broadening their talents) to provide our culture room to grow.College is not for everybody nor is it a right that everyone should attend college. Are there scholarship programs to develop talent in areas where there is a deficit in sufficiently prepared personnel for some lines of work.There are bigger issues that influence this. Our society needs more innovative, successful, well-paid professionals who inturn buy lots of stuff, demand lots of services, and pay lots of taxes. As this pertains to Higher Education, what are universities doing to meet the challenge effectively? Where are its deficits that need to be worked on? For the younger readers, be prepared. Accept that baby boomers and Generation X are pillaging your future. The national budget is loaded to the max with commitments for social security, medicare, and soon health care for some more. We’re sucking the earth dry of petroleum buying from nations that would just assume kill us while we have some fine domestic crude destroying the Gulf of Mexico. There will be a day there will be no more oil for anything — and how are we preparing for that? Somebody else will solve it just as someone else is supposed to pay for all our goodies, our retirement (beyond what we pay in ourselves) medical care…you name it. Because we think it would be nice for all to live a nice upper middle class lifestyle, we act as though all the things that sustain such a lifestyle is our right of citizenship. Let’s tell the boomerang kids what a screwed up depleted world we are leaving them but before we can do that, we have to be honest with ourselves and see in real terms the mess we’ve made.Our credo, “Live it up today, for tomorrow we all shall die!”