Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

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Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Dominus Atheos »

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So much for the economic independence that's supposed to come with young adulthood.

But when unemployment among young men workers is the highest it's been in 61 years, as noted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, it's little wonder that workers under 35 are facing so many economic obstacles.

On Tuesday, the AFL-CIO released the results of a disturbing new Peter Hart survey, "Young Workers: A Lost Decade" that found that about a third of workers under 35 live at home with their parents, and they're far less likely to have health care or job security than they were ten years ago. Even then, in a 1999 survey, when they faced economic insecurity, they still had reasons to be hopeful.

Those days are long gone. A quarter of young workers say they don't earn enough to even pay their monthly bills, a 14% rise from the last survey. As Richard Trumka, the presumptive incoming president of the AFL-CIO, said in a press conference today:
We're calling the report "A Lost Decade" because we're seeing 10 years of opportunity lost as young workers across the board are struggling to keep their heads above water and often not succeeding. They've put off adulthood - - put off having kids, put off education - and a full 34 percent of workers under 35 live with their parents for financial reasons.

Thirty-five percent are significantly less likely to have health care than older workers, only 31 percent make enough money to pay their bills while putting anything aside in savings, and almost half are more worried than hopeful about their economic future.
That's one reason that Trumka and other labor leaders announced this week a new outreach campaign to recruit young workers -- and a stepped-up drive for the Employee Free Choice Act and health care reform. They're using the upcoming Labor Day, with the expected involvement of 100,000 union members in just the AFL-CIO alone in events and actions, as a launching pad to spur Congressional action.

As Trumka declared in a speech Monday at the Center for American Progress (via Working In These Times blog):

The challenge facing unions isn't just to change the way labor laws work; it's to change the way we work.

It's to reconfigure ourselves to respond to the needs of a new generation of working Americans....

Younger workers ought to have health care. They ought to have paid sick leave and paid vacations. They ought to have pensions. They ought to have union representation.

But when they look at unions too often what they see is a remnant of their parents' economy -- not a path to succeed on their own. This is the issue that will decide the future of the American labor movement.

We all hear a lot about unions coming back into the AFL-CIO -- and that's a personal priority of mine - but, ultimately, it won't matter how many unions are in the AFL-CIO if we fail to capture the imagination of millennials.

Now, we ought to be clear: the problem isn't that they have some deep-seated hatred of unions; they don't....They think we do a lot of good things for our members; the problem is that they don't think we have much to offer them.
The union movement hopes to change that perception by offering them the concrete gains unions can offer them in the workplace, and as In These Times's David Moberg observes, they're potentially open to progressive appeals:
They primarily blame Bush, Wall Street/banks, and corporate CEOs and see job loss, inadequate wages, and healthcare costs as working people's biggest economic problems.
They strongly prefer public investment to create jobs over reducing the deficit. And by a 50 to 23 percent margin, they think workers are better off with a union. They support Obama and identify with Democrats much more strongly than older workers.
But the future now looks particularly bleak, especially if the "jobless recovery" continues at its relatively slow pace, and the level playing field for union organizing remains blocked by opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act.

At the media conference on Tuesday, one 31-year-old worker, Nate Scherer, explained his all-too-common plight:
After getting married, my wife and I decided to move in with my parents to pay off our bills. We could afford to live on our own but we'd never be able to get out of debt. We have school loans to pay off, too. We'd like to have children, but we just can't manage the expense of it right now...so we're putting it off till we're in a better place. My [work] position is on the edge, and I feel like if my company were to cut back, my position would be one of the first to go.
Nate at least has a job, but he represents an economic tsunami for young workers that offers a profound challenge to the country -- and our economic future. As Bob Herbert, looking at both long-term joblessness and the problems facing young workers, summed up recently in his column"A Scary Reality":
For those concerned with the economic viability of the American family going forward, the plight of young workers, especially young men, is particularly frightening. The percentage of young American men who are actually working is the lowest it has been in the 61 years of record-keeping, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

Only 65 of every 100 men aged 20 through 24 years old were working on any given day in the first six months of this year. In the age group 25 through 34 years old, traditionally a prime age range for getting married and starting a family, just 81 of 100 men were employed.

For male teenagers, the numbers were disastrous: only 28 of every 100 males were employed in the 16- through 19-year-old age group...

This should be the biggest story in the United States. When joblessness reaches these kinds of extremes, it doesn't just damage individual families; it corrodes entire communities, fosters a sense of hopelessness and leads to disorder.
The union movement's leaders are hoping that by engaging young workers and increasing its power in more workplaces, they can start turning around this crisis and making up for "The Lost Decade."
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Big Orange »

Britain has also sliding into a economic cul-de-sac in the last three decades, partially due to outsourcing to and importing in "cheap" workers, and I can relate to these articles perfectly. Rendering two or so generations mostly jobless is perfect fuel for civil collapse.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Big Phil »

I wonder how much of this change is due to pure economics, and how much is due to changes in society (i.e., children are so protected they never grow up and leave the safety of the nest, and can't learn how to hack it on their own)
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Mr Bean »

Most of this is economists. My own grandparents(And grand-parents in law) were bemoaning just this fact that they raised six kids on the equivalent of a Fry Cook at McDonald salary. And they owned their own home. Their children in turned got good union jobs or new-fangled computer jobs in the 80's and raised their kids and had their own home's on their own.

Mine own generation in my family contains 11 other cousins above the age of 21. Four of them live at home for money's sake and a fifth lives at her husband's mother/father's house while they save up money to move into their own place. Of the rest of us six of us are in Apartments and my two must successful cousins both owned houses at one point. One lost it due to moving(He got out before the market tanked) and the other is in the middle of foreclosure because his house fell off to nearly two/thirds of what is was worth before.

Nine of the twelve of us have degree's. The only one of us who does own a house and still does is my oldest cousin who's owns a house thanks to fact she was given it by our mutal grandmother who owned property down in Florida she no longer needed when she moved to California.

Anecdotal I know, but thanks to my Catholic grandparents I have quite a few aunts and uncles to produce kids, three of the seven of them are catholic as well and were trying to out do her at one point.

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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by erik_t »

SancheztheWhaler wrote:I wonder how much of this change is due to pure economics, and how much is due to changes in society (i.e., children are so protected they never grow up and leave the safety of the nest, and can't learn how to hack it on their own)
I'm sure that you'll shortly provide information on how many of those damned protected children were living at home during the boom times of the 90s.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by une »

I actually hope this becomes a more common trend. I think people move out of their parent's home much too early and would be better served to live with their parents longer than what is normally allowed in American culture.

I currently live on my own, but if I was able to, I think I would move back in with my mother. Living with my Mom would be much cheaper, allowing me to save up more money and at the same time give me more money to spend on fun things like video games and eating out.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Big Phil »

erik_t wrote:
SancheztheWhaler wrote:I wonder how much of this change is due to pure economics, and how much is due to changes in society (i.e., children are so protected they never grow up and leave the safety of the nest, and can't learn how to hack it on their own)
I'm sure that you'll shortly provide information on how many of those damned protected children were living at home during the boom times of the 90s.
That was a question, douchebag, not an invitation to start a flamewar...
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by MKSheppard »

Hun, first thing we do is put everyone who uses illegals into pound me in the ass prison, and deport a shitload of the illegals as well.

There; a major retrograde force on entry-level labor is removed -- the fact that you have a large pool of illegals you can mistreat, and pay shit wages, on the threat of deportation.

Secondly, we need to find a way to reverse the present ever increasing level of requirements -- I've been job hunting on Craigslist, since my job with the Post Office is part time only -- I only go in when the regular person is sick or is on vacation, and he's a freaking machine -- and virtually every job I see is either a secretarial position (I cannot answer phone for obvious reasons); or has the magic words "at least x years experience" or "bachelors degree" as part of the requirement, which effectively removes those jobs from my reach.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Resinence »

Being a 20y/o myself I can say that the majority of people I know from 20-25 are desperate to escape their paranoid and overprotective "psycho" parents. But fully half don't have jobs at any one time, and there is no job security anyway, the only jobs around are shitty casual positions that don't pay a living wage.

And yeah, shep, I have run into the same issues, for the entry level jobs I am qualified to do the magic words "5 years experience" are always there, effectively putting them out of my reach completely.

I'm one of the lucky employed ones but who knows for how long.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Invictus ChiKen »

Same with me. I am lucky to have this job, however t he pay is the federal minimum and there are no raises EVER.

I've found a few jobs that would pay better but it is always x years experiance and a bachelor's doesn't matter in what but you need the degree. Reason I am taking the risk of college next year as the only way I am getting in is loans.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by MKSheppard »

Resinence wrote:the only jobs around are shitty casual positions that don't pay a living wage.
By casual, you mean sort of like working at Walmart, CVS, etc etc? They're fine for a high school kid, or someone working intermittently at college for some extra $$$; but in the MD/DC/VA area; you need what is it; $1,000 minimal for an 1 bedroom apartment in my area -- and $912 a month (Belford Towers, Takoma Park), buys you:
OK, you will love this place if you like:
Mice
Bed bugs
Roaches
Dirty neighbors
Pot heads
Random people roaming the halls
THIN WALLS
Unresponsive management
Cheap repairs
Random skunk smells traveling through your vents
Beds, chairs, tables, electronics and trash left in the hallways
Stinky hallways
Hot water being cut off
Assaults
WELCOME TO BELFORD TOWERS!
40 hours a week x 4 weeks = 160 hours x $7.25 min wage = $1,160 - 25% for various government stuff (SS etc) = about $870-$900 a month. That might actually be liveable, IF you know, you could get reasonable places to live, for about $400-500 bucks a month; but everything rentable here is like I said; $900 bucks or above.
Last edited by MKSheppard on 2009-09-07 12:48am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by ArmorPierce »

I just graduated from university and doubled major in two very marketable majors with a good gpa. I am working for $12 an hour and I consider myself lucky to have found a job at all since I hadn't received any offer before or after that job offer. Unfortunately I cannot buy a new car with this job because the job is temporary and I am not assured to have a job after a few months and I wouldn't be able to continue to pay the bills. I just got to hope my current 20 year old car doesn't die on me in the meantime.

I see plenty jobs in my field of study but most of them need x years of experience. The only other jobs that I got offers for are shitty commission sales jobs (Get your parents to buy our product!) that I could have done without a college diploma.
SancheztheWhaler wrote:I wonder how much of this change is due to pure economics, and how much is due to changes in society (i.e., children are so protected they never grow up and leave the safety of the nest, and can't learn how to hack it on their own)
Right because the younger generation is stupider than each previous generation, nevermind the fact that reading rates are up and more people have high school/university diplomas - those are just watered down degrees compared to the past anyway. Back in mom and dad's/ grandpa and grandma's time, people were just smarter and knew how to live on their own. :roll:

Yes I've seen this used as evidence as spoilt stupid generation as well as them having less job loyalty and other things. I disagree.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Dave »

MKSheppard wrote:has the magic words "at least x years experience"
Resinence wrote: for the entry level jobs I am qualified to do the magic words "5 years experience" are always there, effectively putting them out of my reach completely.
Invictus ChiKen wrote:I've found a few jobs that would pay better but it is always x years experience
I heard, once, that you should apply for these jobs anyway. Assuming a slew of things (you make a good resume, you hand-pick previous jobs and classes on your resume to point out that you have complementary skills or experience in a related field or whatnot, etc) you may be able to make it to the interview, at which point you try to make a good impression, point out that you have to start somewhere, etc.

For what it may be worth.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by MKSheppard »

ArmorPierce wrote:Right because the younger generation is stupider than each previous generation, nevermind the fact that reading rates are up and more people have high school/university diplomas - those are just watered down degrees compared to the past anyway.
They pretty much are. It used to be you could get a decent job with a HS Diploma 30 years ago; but now virtually all decent jobs which do not suck require a college degree now. It's the new HS Diploma.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by ArmorPierce »

MKSheppard wrote:
ArmorPierce wrote:Right because the younger generation is stupider than each previous generation, nevermind the fact that reading rates are up and more people have high school/university diplomas - those are just watered down degrees compared to the past anyway.
They pretty much are. It used to be you could get a decent job with a HS Diploma 30 years ago; but now virtually all decent jobs which do not suck require a college degree now. It's the new HS Diploma.
Well they are watered down due to the fact that the new standard is becoming a college degree minimum since basically everyone has a high school diploma now and a lot more people getting a college degree (although I suppose you can argue that now a lot of high schools are basically college prep as opposed having it in mind to having you ready to work after high school).
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Gil Hamilton »

MKSheppard wrote:They pretty much are. It used to be you could get a decent job with a HS Diploma 30 years ago; but now virtually all decent jobs which do not suck require a college degree now. It's the new HS Diploma.
They only include the "bachelor's degree" thing to limit the flood of applications they'd get otherwise, many of which would simply go to the rotaty file due to being sent in on crayon. If you can put together an alright resume, you should apply anyway. Sometimes, you can get an interview regardless of your educational status and once you get there in person, you can prove that you aren't a complete schmuck (which is the other reason for "any bachelor's degree" requirement, it demonstrates that you can even half-assedly stick with something for a length of time). You might get the job anyway. The trick is that most of such jobs are things that any monkey could do and they damn well know it, they just want a shot at a monkey that is potentially less of a stinker than normal. Here's a hint, alot of people who end up at such jobs are still pretty smelly monkeys regardless. If you make a good show of yourself when you finally get an interview, they aren't going to care that you don't have a BA in Underwater Basketweaving. They are more going to care that you aren't going to rob them blind or be someone they are going to fire in two weeks anyway.

Keep in mind though, jobs that specify a "bachelor's degree" without giving any details, just any bachelor's degree, suck too. It just means your job sucks in an office with a pointy haired boss rather than your job sucking in a CVS. There are few entry level jobs that don't suck major balls, unless you half a SPECIFIC degree, know someone, and likely interned at the company already.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Mr Bean »

Funny enough I got my current job despite not being qualified for it because I argued successfully that my military time was the equivalent of a four year computer degree and eight years in the industry. Turns out as mentioned they simply used high requirements to weed out most of the people right out of high school or collage who normaly apply to any open IT position in Cincinnati.

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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Solauren »

Okay, time to break out the clue stick for you job seekers that are scared by the 'X years of experience'

The purpose of that is to, as mentioned, weed out the 'just out of high school applicants', AND to give an air-tight excuse not to hire someone that is deemed 'unsuitable to the position' for whatever reason. Yes, some companies abuse it, but most do not. (They have other ways to weed people out)

It also has another use; to attrach the hungry. I don't mean as in 'give me a sandwich', I mean as in 'I WANT the challenge'.

It also gives the employeer room at the negotiating table as it comes to your salary.

"Well, we were offering someone with 5 years experience 30/hr. However, since you don't have it, but have the skill set, we'll offer you $20/hr"

I knew that before I left college. Why don't any of you?
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Skylon »

SancheztheWhaler wrote:I wonder how much of this change is due to pure economics, and how much is due to changes in society (i.e., children are so protected they never grow up and leave the safety of the nest, and can't learn how to hack it on their own)
I've encountered very few individuals like this. The friends I have still at home with their parents are still seeking to get out in some way, and their primary obstacle is inability to find work that pays well enough.

My current job, after three (going on four) years has dead-ended me from the looks of it in terms of advancement. However, I'd be insane to leave until I find something better as I have health coverage etc.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by ArmorPierce »

Solauren wrote:Okay, time to break out the clue stick for you job seekers that are scared by the 'X years of experience'

The purpose of that is to, as mentioned, weed out the 'just out of high school applicants', AND to give an air-tight excuse not to hire someone that is deemed 'unsuitable to the position' for whatever reason. Yes, some companies abuse it, but most do not. (They have other ways to weed people out)

It also has another use; to attrach the hungry. I don't mean as in 'give me a sandwich', I mean as in 'I WANT the challenge'.

It also gives the employeer room at the negotiating table as it comes to your salary.

"Well, we were offering someone with 5 years experience 30/hr. However, since you don't have it, but have the skill set, we'll offer you $20/hr"

I knew that before I left college. Why don't any of you?
That may be how it's normally done but in the current job atmosphere employers are being a lot more strict. Fresh college graduates are competing with people who had years of experience willing to take less of a risk with people who don't got the experience. Not to mention that a lot of job applications are done on the internet these days so you have less of an opportunity to 'sell' yourself. In certain jobs in certain fields, when they say "require 5 years experience" you may be able to get it if you have say 2 years, definitely not fresh graduate.

But yes, if a job says experience required you can go ahead and apply for a job, you may get lucky..
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Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by RedImperator »

There's a couple facts to be remembered here:

1. The American education system was designed in the late 19th century for a late 19th century economy, and despite all the tinkering around the edges since then, that's still the education system we have. The vast majority of students are only intended to learn enough to be factory workers--basic literacy and mathematics, following directions, and a basic stab at history and civics so that the factory worker (who can vote, remember) is at least minimally informed at the polls. It was also designed at a time where a substantial percentage of students were expected to drop out once they were old enough to do farm work, and others would quit before graduation in order to start work in their teenage years. That means that we have a system that is not designed to produce substantial numbers of highly-educated workers and not designed to graduate everyone who enters the system.

2. Child labor laws and the decline of the small farm have left no outlet for students who aren't suited for high school. Bored troublemakers and total idiots who would have dropped out and found productive work in previous decades must be accommodated through 12th grade. Compounding this is the near total lack of good jobs for those without a high school diploma. Schools are under tremendous pressure to produce 100% graduation rates.

3. The effect of #2 is twofold: first, it closes an important safety valve for public schools (one private schools and charter schools still enjoy): the ability to kick troublemakers out. It is extremely difficult to expel someone from high school, and impossible for anything less than an assault on a teacher or multiple assaults on other students (and from my experience in inner-city schools, even that isn't a guaranteed expulsion; more likely, it means time in an alternative disciplinary school before being cycled back into mainstream schools).

Second, it inevitably causes an erosion of standards, especially for "general" students who aren't expected to go to college (or at least not particularly good colleges). It's not much of an exaggeration to say that the only requirement for graduating from an American high school is learning how to hold a pencil pointy-end down. NCLB (No Child Left Behind) was intended to correct this; as near as I can tell, the practical effect has been that administrators have learned many new and exciting ways to cook their books to appear as if they're making Adequate Yearly Progress, but the students are actually learning less, as curriculum gets pared down to NCLB "prep" (read: cram courses).

4. All of this has a toxic effect on teacher morale. Running a classroom is a constant fight to keep control, and if too many of your kids are failing, it's your ass. You have no choice in who you teach, and more and more, you have no choice what you teach. The last decade of educational reform has centralized curriculum control, practically, in the hands of the state bureaucracies who write the standardized tests. If you are an English or math teacher in the School District of Philadelphia, for example, at the beginning of the year, you will receive a book of 180 lesson plans customized for the PSSA exam. It is not optional.

These are additional headaches piled on top of long hours and comparatively low pay, at a time when more and more states and districts are encouraging or even requiring masters degrees for teachers. Try to imagine the cognitive dissonance there: you're a master's holding professional with almost no control over your own professional practice. It gets worse when you realize the management structure of public schools was designed by disciples of Frederick Taylor--the same Taylor who developed the theory of "scientific management" for factories. The default management structure in a public school reserves all decision making--even trivial decisions like the thermostat setting--for the administration, and encourages the administration to "automate" teaching as much as possible by designing specific procedures for teachers to follow without variation. There's a serious conflict here: we want teachers to be professionals and train teachers to think of themselves as professionals, but management wants them to be assembly line workers and treats them like assembly line workers. The reaction from teachers has been unionization, which gives tenured teachers the ability to ignore management to an extent, and also gives teachers as a whole the power to bargain for certain administrative concessions (some union contracts even specify curricula that have been negotiated between teachers and management). Unfortunately, this is far from an ideal solution, and unions don't protect young teachers in their first three years on the job. Young teachers are also invariably assigned the worst students and the least desirable extra duties (cafeteria monitor for the freshman lunch period, for example).

So, lousy conditions, tyrannical management, long hours, low pay. What do you get? An exodus of young, talented teachers. The average time to burnout for a new teacher is five years. Even worse, the teachers who are needed the most (math and science) can most easily find jobs in other fields, causing perpetual shortages in critical subjects, increasing pressure on remaining teachers, causing more burnout, worsening the shortage, increasing the pressure, et cetera.

Of course, not every teacher resents strict administrative control. If you have the right attitude, you can spend your whole career on autopilot, teaching pre-made lesson plans, assigning pre-written homework and pre-written multiple choice exams that can be graded by machines. Administrators love these teachers because they might gripe, but they always follow directions (they keep on top of their record-keeping and do it to administrative standards, too, which is how you make friends fastest in the front office). As long as they can keep their classrooms under control (which is easier when your lessons consist of lecturing from the podium and assigning questions from the end of the chapter), they can cruise all the way to retirement.

The only problem is that those teachers suck.

5. Okay, so the system as designed tends to produce bad teaching and low standards--and remember, even as designed, the best result you're going to get is a vast number of people suited to mindless assembly-line work, a handful of tradesmen, and an even smaller handful of professionals. However, since the 19th century, the numbers of blue collar jobs has plunged and the number of professional jobs has soared (not evenly, of course: a number of blue collar jobs have been replaced by paper hat jobs instead, which require about the same education level but pay a fraction of even entry-level factory work). There has been no serious attempt to redesign the public school system, so the market had to find another solution. Which brings us to...

6. Everyone goes to college! Colleges in the 19th century had two roles: professional training and finishing schools for the upper class. Generally, the Ivy Leagues did the latter (with some exceptions, such as medicine and law), while engineering schools and the land-grant schools (big state colleges) did the former. The number of students was small and the students were typically the best and the brightest (as long as they were white native-born Protestant males; women, minorities, new immigrants and Jews were generally excluded from college until after WWII).

In the 20th century, as the high school diploma lost its value and the number of good high-school-only jobs declined, college admissions soared. Colleges found themselves with vast numbers of students who in prior generations would have gotten jobs straight out of high school. At first, during the postwar expansion, the new students were interested in filling the vast numbers of new professional jobs opening up (I don't have numbers on me, but I imagine the demand for engineers, scientists, doctors, and lawyers soared after WWII--the Interstate Highway System alone would have employed tens of thousands of engineers). However, very soon the colleges found themselves with more students than they knew what to do with, most of whom were not talented enough or interested enough for a career in science, engineering, or medicine. As a result, the number of people in "soft" majors soared, even while the number of careers in those soft fields remained low. There simply isn't that much demand for historians in the world, even if this country actually gave a damn about history (note: it doesn't).

So what do we have? Huge numbers of people going to college and getting degrees with no practical use. And college is expensive. The supply of grant and scholarship money is nowhere near the demand, leaving students and their families stuck with loans to finance their educations. You can go to law or business school after college, but that costs even more money, and those fields are glutted anyway. Cash-strapped students can start in community college, but there's a stigma attached to this and a perception that that will damage your resume. Staying in-state is a good option, especially in a state with high-quality public colleges, but the college admissions industry and high school counselors (as well as society in general) push students and their parents towards the most prestigious schools possible, regardless of cost or practicality. Students are also encouraged to disregard cost in favor of non-academic criteria such as campus life and "atmosphere", and while these things are important, campus life doesn't pay the rent after you graduate. The majority of students who enter the job market take entry level white-collar jobs, up to their necks in debt and often with no practical skills they couldn't have acquired in high school anyway. Many others can't find a good job, and so take out another loan to go to grad school (the student loan companies will helpfully defer your payments--but not your interest--while you're there). Then they graduate up to their ears in debt and take an entry-level white collar job anyway. And this has become our national policy! School districts have spent the last decade and a half or so exacerbating the problem by dismantling vocational education programs, closing off potential avenues for thousands of students better suited to a trade than a profession, including poor minorities who have been so screwed by their public educations that they have no realistic chance of surviving college anyway (at one Philadelphia school, which is not the worst in the district by far, the rate of students who actually graduate college is less than 1%. This school is considered a college prep school by the district. It was once home to an extremely popular and high quality vocational program as well as an art magnet program. The art program was gutted and the vocational program dismantled entirely).

So yeah, the entire education system is a total clusterfuck from stem to stern, and I've begun to give up hope it will ever be repaired. In this environment, it's perfectly understandable why 29-year-olds live with their parents still--they're carrying a mortgage's worth of debt to pay for an education that got them a $10/hr desk job. Compounding the disaster are economic trends--not just the present recession (though God knows that hasn't helped anyone, especially tradesmen), but the advent of outsourcing, which has thrown actual skilled professionals out of work and increased the competition for white-collar paper-shuffling jobs. Even the collapse in housing prices hasn't helped, because the rental market is slam-full.

In conclusion, if you're under 30 in America, there's a good chance you're completely fucked. Happy Labor Day.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by JME2 »

In conclusion, if you're under 30 in America, there's a good chance you're completely fucked. Happy Labor Day.
That's an accurate observation that I and my closest friends are increasingly identifying with. At the moment, I'm living with one of my aunts; it's economically beneficial for both of us, but I'm hoping to be able to rectify that within another year.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by The Duchess of Zeon »

Yeah, the only real option may end up being to just keep going to school in a lot of cases. Certainly there's only a few fields in which employment remains normative for people graduating with a BS (forget a BA, just forget it). Even though I'm in one of those fields, I'll be applying to graduate school at the same time I'm sifting my way through job offers--just in case, so that I can continue to seamlessly receive financial aid if something doesn't turn up. And yes, engineers can still get job offers while not having quite finished their degree. Though I am going to probably rely a bit heavily on connections for that regardless, and am keeping my eyes open for various interning prospects. This, again, is normative.

But on a broader scale I don't think we can consider people to be truly adults until they're 30 unless circumstances force responsibility on them so fast that they have to take steps toward autonomy before them... And I certainly don't intend to ever let that happen to my children; I'd fully expect them to require 100% support until age 30, and possibly until age 35 if working on a Ph.D. and I'd only find it odd if they were past those marks without some effort at functioning on their own. And it would be my fault for screwing up as a parent, too. I have nothing but contempt for those parents who still kick their children out at 18, and there are many, because that's what was done to them. The simple fact is that structurally in the modern world that's an impossible expectation.
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Questor »

I'd like to add to what Red Imperator has said regarding the dismantling of vocational training.

Even the schools that have retained it, or are trying to develop programs, are running up against the fact that a good vocational training program costs a fortune to set up and run. I've seen the numbers on our autoshop programs, and I know intimately how much our computer/network, computer graphics, video production, and tech theater programs cost. I shudder to think at the cost of some of the programs I've seen proposed.

Some of these are mostly expensive on the setup, but what many don't realize is that one time costs, especially in technology aren't one time costs. Even physical plant must be updated relatively often (compared to the rest of the school).
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Re: Lost Decade: 1/3 of young people under 35 live with parents

Post by Guardsman Bass »

Gil Hamilton wrote:The trick is that most of such jobs are things that any monkey could do and they damn well know it, they just want a shot at a monkey that is potentially less of a stinker than normal. Here's a hint, alot of people who end up at such jobs are still pretty smelly monkeys regardless. If you make a good show of yourself when you finally get an interview, they aren't going to care that you don't have a BA in Underwater Basketweaving. They are more going to care that you aren't going to rob them blind or be someone they are going to fire in two weeks anyway.
That reminds me of what one of the Admissions Officers at the University of Virginia told my uncle when we were looking at the school as a possibility (I was with him because he was looking at some of the same schools for his daughter, my cousin). The guy basically said that if you weren't an engineering, sciences, or possibly a business major, you were basically going to get hired for the writing skills you developed when you got your degree.
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