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I'm Gen Y and I'm not lazy, though I feel like a lot of my peers expected to earn the big bucks the minute they graduated from college, and that's just not realistic. Instead, it's easier to blame "corporations" and "the man" than to work hard to get to the desired position and income level.
So here's the thing...When I enrolled in college in 2006, the only grads that weren't working productively didn't want to/weren't looking hard. Median salary was something around $45k, etc...Fast forward four years, and we were much more likely to be unemployed or underemployed (working our old summer jobs, barrista's, bartender's, landscapers...) The median salary was about $10k less, etc. We've just had to put in a few more years at lower level jobs to get to where guys a few years ahead of us were.
I think your anecdotal experience regarding 2006 is not nearly accurate on a national scale, and is far different than reality.
In fact, people graduating prior to 2006 were dealing with cut budgets post 911...and were in fact expected to do unpaid internships, etc. throughout school to build office skills.
I didn't even have health insurance and a salaried job until 2007, and that was after a Master's and I graduated with my BS in 2002 at the age of 26, I'd already done 3 internships in my field and worked as a temp, not to mention all the regular jobs people do like waitressing and camp counselling.
I am Gen X so I sympathize with Gen Y complaints, but I'm getting a little tired of hearing them. Sure, maybe they have a bigger student loan debt. That's a function of increasing costs over time. Maybe you walk away now with a $50,000 college debt, but if you get a job you probably will make more money than I did 20 years ago.
Plus, did you ever stop to think that maybe you shouldn't have gone to Princeton, Stanford, MIT if you had no idea how you would pay back your student loans? What's that you're saying? Everyone promised that you would make $200,000 as CEO of your own company right after graduation? Oh well, I guess you shouldn't have believed them. Maybe you should have gone to a good quality, less expensive university like one of the state schools.
I paid for school by taking student loans and by working 40 hours a week. Not everyone can do that, but it wouldn't hurt if more college students worked at least part time.
Unfortunately the problem with your argument is the average student loan amount taken out today is far greater then previous generations due to the rise in education costs. So students today are buried under far greater debt than previously. Shame on us entitled folk for expecting work that at least helps us pay this down.
Of course, Gen Y also has the debt forgiveness available to them that was not available to previous generations. 10 years in any public sector job and your entire student loan debt is wiped out.
As a Gen Xer, I feel like a bystander in the BB, Gen Y, Millennial generation war. Boomers do not want to hire anyone from the younger generations, and the younger generations do not want to work for them anyway. It all works out though because the Gen Y and Millennials are strong entrepreneurial generations that are creating and succeeding with their own companies at amazing rates. And whose lunch are they eating to establish these companies? BB founded and staffed companies.
Gen Xers seem to be almost nowhere in this fight. Too young for management (still) and crushed experience-wise and entrepreneurially by the dot-com bust. Too old (i.e. they have families and assets to risk) for the new startup wave. Really the flaw of that group is being by far the smallest post-WWII generation. Going to be interesting when the boomers do finally retire and you are left with a workforce of lifetime middle management gen Xers with super ambitious Gen Yers and Millenials running their own companies. Not sure where the Fortune 500 will turn to run their companies.
Last edited by marigolds6; 01-20-2014 at 01:59 PM..
You definitely touched on a serious point panderson, the most selfish generation has the audacity to call us entitled. They expect Medicaid to remain funded, social security to remain funded, banks and big business to keep getting bailed out....yet who is going to pay for that? Oh thats right us entitled folk.
WHAT????????? WE HAVE PAID INTO SOCIAL SECURITY FOR DECADES!!!!!!! We have been paying taxes for decades.
I don't understand why most of the baby booms, I know there are some cases but they're the minority, are griping as SS as to why they can't retire. Aren't their pensions big enough? I guess they NEED ss, too. Maybe they can sell one of their multiple homes they got for dirt cheap and use that cash to fund retirement. Nope, they have to keep lavish houses, big pension, ect. That's why they can't retire. Retiring would mean not keeping up with the Jones. Look at the one poster talking about having to have the most expensive gadgets. The baby boomers have to keep up appearances even if that means someone else is screwed out of a very entry level job. Most be nice to be on top.
That was my 76 year old dad with the gadgets - and he's not a Baby Boomer.
Not only that - he's paying cash from his retirement savings for those gadgets - why shouldn't he have them? Why shouldn't his 85 year old neighbor have a tablet? I mean, my gosh, their great grandchildren have these gadgets but the elderly, who have saved for decades, can't have them?
Of course, Gen Y also has the debt forgiveness available to them that was not available to previous generations. 10 years in any public sector job and your entire student loan debt is wiped out.
yeah, I find myself in the unlucky spot of being a young Genx -- so I have all the debt, but didn't have the nice cushy family life or encouragement, and all these great things obama is doing for the younger set, will I'm too old for those!
no one really gets it easy its just about making the best of your circumstances....and the article I read was basically getting at that is something gen y is not particularly good at since their parents did so much for them, and they don't handle disappointment as well.
of course they are generalities...you can't speak about generations without making generalities. I understand being that I seem to be on the end of both generations at 36. My older siblings are much more squarely in another generation and would think of me as more Geny....but I seem to have gotten both good and bad things from each culture...especially being that my parents are not boomers but a bit older, much more traditional and stressed education less so i had to figure it all out for myself, being that they pretty much just expected me to get married off.
WHAT????????? WE HAVE PAID INTO SOCIAL SECURITY FOR DECADES!!!!!!! We have been paying taxes for decades.
Don't forget that part - it's pretty important.
Social security is a ponzi scheme and there are numerous reports talking about how it is going to be bankrupt soon. Do you think Congress is going to let it go bankrupt? No. They will increase the withholding on us younguns'.
“Neither Medicare nor Social Security can sustain projected long-run programs in full under currently scheduled financing, and legislative changes are necessary to avoid disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers.”
I also want to point out just how dramatically the cost of education has increased. Between today and when I entered college in 2006, the tuition + room and board at my university has increased $15,000 per year (which was more than my parents paid in all 4 years!). It's simply unsustainable for colleges to increase that much in 8 years, especially when during that time period the economy crashed, decimating many students' college funds. Now, I worked my tush off in high school in order earn scholarships at schools a halfstep below what I could get into in order to graduate debt free. I don't have all that much sympathy for people who come out of undergrad with $100,000 of student loan debt because to me, that means that they did not plan to maximize scholarships.
That said, circumstances change and many schools pass the tuition increases on to students every year, rather than grandfather in the old rate. That is incredibly difficult for most families to handle. Even with a 75% tuition scholarship at my undergrad, students would still need to pony up more than $20,000 a year for the rest of tuition, room, and board (and living off campus really isn't any cheaper - especially when you factor in likely needing to buy furniture and transportation). Work study jobs on campus are limited to 20 hours a week so you're really not looking at earning much during the year if your university is not in an area where there are flexible off-campus jobs close enough to walk or take public transit to.
By the time I was a college student, many of the previously paid summer internships turned into unpaid for credit programs. No only did the internship itself not pay, but often students had to PAY THE SCHOOL in order to earn credits. No ability to earn credits, no internship. I accepted that I might need to do unpaid internships as an underclassman, but expected to find something paid in my senior year. Then the markets crashed, and very few industries in my area kept their paid internship programs. I was happy to find any internship at all since many unpaid internships disappeared as well.
So you have students who might have done everything right, but still are facing huge barriers to paying for college. They come out with loans bigger than what they might have anticipated (and, for a certain subset of Generation Y, myself included, a totally different economy from what they experienced when the first went into college) to a job market with few jobs and stagnating wages. Everything else has gotten much more expensive - I sort of chuckle now when I look at my grocery spreadsheets from 2010 - it was so cheap! And rent seems to go up $100 every year.
I have so many hardworking friends still living at home with their parents - generally contributing to the mortgage, utilities, etc. They're not lazy, but society often sees them as so because they would rather stay at home than spend $800+ a month to live with roommates or $1400+ to live on their own. Life goals are different now - there's less emphasis on "traditional" markers of adulthood like buying a home or a car. We're gunshy, we budget and obssess over what little savings we are able to put away. At least, that's the perception I get among my peers.
It does bother me when my whole generation is painted as lazy. I worked full time through a stage IV cancer diagnosis and 6 months of chemo, started grad school shortly after ending treatment, and still managed to be a powerhouse producer despite my illness and subsequent courseload. While most people thankfully aren't in such extreme situations, I have no doubt that my peers would muscle through the same thing. Unfortunately, you hear our complaints more frequently as well thanks to the internet.
be glad most of generationy has parents that will still allow them to live at home. My generation is not really that way. At least now most people understand the effort college requires, the cost and the economy, my parents were not so sympathetic when I couldn't support myself off my internships out of college. They didn't get it at all that the world had changed.
the point is though, that new grads need to be getting experience anywhere they can whether it pays or not because that will pay down the road.
too many have an entitlement complex where they expect to shoot to the top immediatley upon graduation, I've seen it time and time again.
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