[jane_sm1th73]

The 10 Cities With The Most Young Adults Living With Their Parents - Business Insider

Disclosure: the following is somewhat of a rant on the topic of how the majority of CT young people have the cards stacked against them in this state.

I do think CT is a very, very tough place for young people to reach escape velocity. I would like to see stats for more cities across the country. A 300 city sample - say six for each state - would be my wish list.

For the Bridgeport case presented here, I can see it. How are you going to sustain $1200/month rent in a $12/hour economy (that's $25K/year)? Or buy a place to live when the wishing prices are ten times annual income?

I see it as a war against the young on three fronts. On one front, aged boomers - who haven't the cash to move elsewhere OR the know-how to maintain their houses - still live the fantasy that their houses will fund their retirements. On the second front, the entry level jobs have either been offshored or (at the lower tier) taken over by illegal aliens. On the third front, being given the prospect of a $12/hour opportunity while carrying $25K (let's say) in nondischargeable debt takes $400/month out of your pocket before anything else is paid. How are you going to get a start in life other than by going on Section 8?

The state colleges (West Conn, for example) specialize in teacher ed, when school age enrollments have been declining for years - except in inner cities. When it comes down to it, CT teachers march to the tune of the teacher's union, which has sheltered the mediocre and has thus kept the level of educational attainment at "mediocre" for generations. Try teaching an innumerate 19 year old intermediate algebra after an incompetent teacher has soured him/her forever on math. Forget intermediate algebra. Try showing an innumerate and illiterate 19 year old the big picture of bandwidth allocation, routing, ISO layers and network security (subjects whose mastery ensures good jobs in other states, and - since networks are local - CAN'T be offshored) and their eyes glaze over. CT teachers, in the aggregate, are innumerate and (since the union protects them) ignorant about IT and network design. For them, the job is an entitlement. The future employment prospects of the kids - not their problemo.

So, the state educational institutions specialize in subject matter - teaching - in which the incumbents perform below the bar. Who the heck wants to hire a teacher from such a place? Other than the local towns, who don't know any better. (Ever watch a HS administrator try to wiggle out from doing an Internet search? I have. They don't even know how to Google around to find out careers with the greatest likelihood of employment. It's like asking them to speak Martian. Pathetic, really - until they feel fear, and then they pull the arrogance card. Still pathetic.)

The place is stagnant. If I WANTED to tell twentysomethings to "Move Out!", I would be hard pressed to find a better way to do it. Of course, the twentysomethings have been brought up in an educational system where critical thinking is politically incorrect - by the time they wake up and wonder why, at age 40, they're still making $12/hour and can't afford the property taxes after their parents die, when their classmates who wound up in Huntsville, Alabama have jobs, families and paid off houses, it will be too late for them to reconfigure their lives. They will wind up as the third generation of hardened, entitlement driven kids who will demand that they get theirs. Of course, by remaining in CT, they never had a choice - the outcome was preordained.

Sure, Malloy can buy jobs. NO companies are hiring entry level CT natives. The people they ARE hiring have experience in the field. Doing odd jobs and mowing lawns for cash doesn't count. So CT tax dollars fund jobs for residents from elsewhere (where they got the relevant experience).

Anybody else see that this does not bode well? And that more taxpayer funded corporate bribery, welfare, and nicey-nice with the (teachers) unions is not the answer? Anybody else willing to call a spade a spade?

IMHO, CT is now at the point where the people who are getting taxpayer bennies (state and municipal jobs. Food stamps. Section 8 housing. Paid-for cell phones. Food stamps. AFDC) outnumber those who don't. The only folks who DON'T see it is the next generation of welfare recipients - because they have been brought up to be ignorant. It's too bad they had freedom of choice taken away from them, by virtue of being brought up in deliberate ignorance, by a generation who hopes they will remain trapped in order to have somebody left in the state to fund their retirements.

Rant off.

[Stylo]

The coddling and "you're gonna make it after college" mentality was huge in my high school. I'm in my late 20's and know an alarming number of people that are still living at home.

[bobtn]

The factories that were there just 25 years ago if they still existed in Bridgeport would have left the city off this list. BTW, I'm not talking just blue collar jobs, but most of these factories were in the neighborhood of 20% employment being white-collar professional, and 1/2 or more of the professional positions required less than a 4 year degree.

Good example would be one street-Hancock Ave circa 1987, b/w Casco, Hubbell, and Bryant , with more than 1,700 jobs, at least 300 were white collar professional, so their closure affected both a white and blue collar population.

[basehead617]

Since politics have already been injected into the thread, let me just say it's amusing to hear the right wing these days complain about 'where are the jobs?' and the "Obama economy" when they are the architects of sending all the jobs of the previous generation overseas.

Where are the jobs, indeed... we know the answer.

[JayCT]

Jane - Another rant about the "horrors" of Connecticut? Really??? Give me a break. THERE IS NO WAR!!!

First of all your statistics are for Fairfield County which is one of the most expensive and affluent parts of the country. This is not necessarily true for the rest of the state particularly Hartford and New Haven.

Our State universities offer MANY other majors that prepare students for other jobs not just teaching. WHy you are ranting about this is beyond me. They do have teaching as a major because that is what they were founded for. This is true almost every state university in the country. They were founded over 100 years ago to train teachers at a time when they were needed but have certainly changed since then. They now offer programs in business, computers, medical services and engineering plus many others which are the types of jobs that are available today.

As for Connecticut being stagnant, I would contend that you are WRONG. It is stable which is GOOD. It does not have the wide swings in the economy that other so called youth friendly places have experienced. All you have to do to prove this is look at our unemployment rate which is consistently below the national average. That means we have jobs while other states do not. How is that bad???

Corporate bribery is praticed by just about every state, not just here. Look at the deals other states have offered to lure jobs. It is everywhere and has been for decades now. Oh yeah, BobTN - There is more to the workd economy these days than manufacturing. Your mind set is that same as the farmers had at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

Enough with the consistantly negative threads. We get it you do not like Connecticut and its economy. So stay in that perfect place you have found elsewhere and give us all a break from the useless rants. Jay

[7 Wishes]

I have to agree with JayCT that it is really only on there because "Bridgeport" for this survey is "metro" which means Fairfield County, and it is the extreme expense of housing that is the real factor. Note that New York City itself (which includes very expensive Long Island and Westchester County in the "metro" definitions") is #5 and Los Angeles and a lot of it's expensive peripheral "exurb metro areas" like Riverside are on the list too.

Miami and Honolulu are on there for the same reasons. Only the TX metro areas and Scranton reflect to me a "bad economy" on that top 10 list (though one thought with Scranton is that the easternmost definition of it's metro area are really inexpensive extreme exurbs of NYC and it could reflect people from there staying home with mom and dad until they find a distant NYC job that they can afford to move closer to).