To Seattle Millennials, the Future Looks Scary
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Newsflash, Millenials: there has never been a time to my knowledge when you tell someone you're working on a degree in "musical theater" and their response would not be, "oh, studying to be a waiter, eh?"
"Tech, they say, means military drones, loss of privacy and cyberbullying."
Don't worry, you won't be working at any of the companies involved after your javascript bootcamp. Chin up, tech also means accounting systems at insurance companies. It won't be exciting work, but it'll pay better than musical theater. (Tech also means that phone you can't quit staring at, so if you'd like help off that high horse...)
The derision w/r/t the woman's educational choice is so trite I'm wondering if it might be satire. Not everyone's goal in life to maximize money earned. Some people value a certain passion over riches, and many other believe that those with a lesser-paid passion deserve to live decent lives, not burdened with excessive debt.
As for the 'tech' comment... it resonated well enough with me, and seemed genuine. I didn't detect any 'high horse' as you call it.
It seems like you went into this article looking for something to criticize instead of attempting to empathize with the situation the individuals face.
For the curious, one was an algorithms class, and the other was "Group Software Design", where we had lectures about the Waterfall method "which all serious companies use" (it was the early 90s) and had a team that was supposed to code a final project according to the methods taught: so, weeks of requirements and documentation, then a quick spurt of work to actually code it. What really happened was weeks of debating what language/libraries to use, then with 2 weeks left one of us actually stubbed out the code, so his language choice won, then we pulled all-nighters for those 2 weeks to code it. The guy that skipped the coding sessions was told to document it after the fact. It was a highly educational experience that was directly applicable to real coding work :)
I've noticed that coders more often have CS or SE degrees now at work, and that the education is given more attention, though I don't particularly value it - a degree simply assures me that you've done X hours of coding, not that you learned anything nor that what you learned is applicable. Show me anything you've coded on your own time and it's immediately more telling. (and I've interviewed too many college grads that have never coded anything that wasn't for a school assignment)
If you can't make a living that doesn't burden you with excessive debt then your passion isn't a career it's a hobby and you should treat it as such.
I thought it was a poignant article about the general anxieties that myself and my peers feel. I'm well off right now being in tech, but nearly all of my friends who aren't are debt-averse so don't want to mortgage their future to go back to school. Making it in king county which is the only place say a paralegal can think to make more than $40k in the state is fucking difficult. The jobs that pay well are all in the denser areas, which are hugely expensive. People are moving there because there aren't many opportunities in rural communities - you have to be in a major metro area.
Houses aren't places to live for those that own them, they're investments that they will fight tooth and nail to make sure the value of which never goes down. The #1 rule of buying property within 2 hours of where jobs are - already own a house. There's no bottom rung of the ladder anymore.
"Seattle, where she came after college in Utah to study musical theater"
"She counts the months until the tech job she hopes to get after Ada can help pay off the $22,000 student debt she has left."
"...studied philosophy and the history of science at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., has had jobs as a barista, a taxi dispatcher and a deli worker. She has $72,000 of student debt and has never been paid an annual wage, she said, of more than $17,000."
I'm a history and philosophy of science and technology person myself, but it's never paid or pretended to.
That's what I was thinking after reading the opening paragraphs: "...and you didn't learn a damned thing from it, did you?"
High school guidance counselors, the music and TV shows produced by the adults in the room, and many of our parents, thank you very much.
People learn what they've been taught, and a core message to 90s children was "follow your dreams and it'll all work out". It was considered very crass to run the numbers.
So did Boomer pop culture, in spades (Its not like the "Hippie" identity was created by Millenials.)
Gen X, not so much, though.
Part of the reason for gullibility at that age is no incentive to work really hard in school and trying to understand how adult life works. Grades instead of ranks, no fear of falling into poverty or survival mode (as would happen in a poorer country)
There is no reward for 'think and proceed'. There is reward for 'go with the flow' and that is temporary respite, not having to struggle, having fun etc.
At a systemic level, kids have to be encouraged to compete and become better AND demand better from others to be able to succeed.
I used to think I'd become a writer and write a book like Harry potter. At age 10, this naivety is cute. At 18, that literally is money (and possibly future life).
Schooling really needs a revamp.
A lot of it, I think, is cultural. Growing up poor but with a shot at college, you tend to make choices to not be poor. If you grow up affluent, there's a lot of "follow your dream"/"do what you love" despite the probability of maintaining affluence. So you end up studying musical theatre or Celtic Studies and working as an articulate barista.
So yeah, some of us were that smart at 18.
If I wanted to learn something, I was pretty much on my own. I found school to be largely a waste of time but I had little say in attending elementary, middle and high school. I still felt the same way by the time I was graduating college, but I wasn't quite ready to enter the Real World and college was a good excuse to avoid it.
I received a Pell Grant for the first semester of college, but the paper work was insane so I ended up working my way through college. In this, I was fortunate that cheap (as in "too easy to get") student loans had yet to flood the market with money so tuition wasn't insane. That, and I attended a Florida State college as a resident (cheaper than going out of state) and it was only a few miles from home so I saved money there.
This Anxious in America series is questionable. The last one about the vape lounge was widely derided even by the Times' usually sympathetic commenters.
That said, they may be reporting on Millennials anxiety but not endorsing it as justified. Just informing us this is how they're thinking.
So, maybe, even if you're making 100k a year, you probably are thinking that buying that 2/1 lowest on the market starter home for $500k is a recipe for disaster. But if you'd gotten in 15 years ago, you'd see 300% returns like your parents have on that house.
Good, because that's how it usually is. The 80s and 90s were remarkable for their economic growth and lack of recessions. The business cycle is about 6-8 years.
Our parents had to get mortgages when interest rates were 17%.
Our grandparents grew up during the great depression, and worked when marginal tax rates were north of 50%.
Every generation has something to contend with.
A simple admission that there ARE hard problems that millennials have to face is all I generally ask for when people call us lazy, entitled and stupid. Its been very difficult to find economics of just living that make sense even during this current boom period. Its gonna suck REALLY hard when a bust happens, and you can bet a lot of existing institutions are gonna have to change.
See "Economics: Public and Private Choice" by Gwartney, Stroup, Sobel, MacPherson. The part you want is "Lessons from the Great Depression", which is Special Topic #6 in the 14th edition.
It's pretty damning. We responded by restricting trade, creating cartels, destroying food, and so many other self-destructive things.
Why make the assumption that all millenials think that way? Neither me nor any of my friends think that way. If you are convinced that millenials as a group are more likely to behave that way then do a sociological study with a large enough sample size rather than providing anecdata.