John Mayer is famous for the words in his song “No Such Thing”: “Welcome to the real world she said to me, condescendingly ‘Take a seat. Take your life; plot it out in black and white.’” What would follow became the manifesto of millions of young Americans as they gird their loins to brave the hostile place Mayer so aptly called “the real world.” He told us how he anticipated the unrealized joy of walking the halls of his high school at his 10 year reunion, reveling in the knowledge that he was able to accomplish so much on his own terms in his own style singing “I am invincible.”
It’s a brilliant melody and one that shows the songwriting talent, raw vocals and courage of Mayer as an artist. That’s the reason it is so attractive to our ears. Not only was the message one that Generation Y welcomed in a time when the lines of creativity were starting to grow more rigid and the limits of expression were beginning to bump their heads against the ceiling, but that this generation had not truly heard from one of its own (Mayer barely made it into the most technology savvy and politically correct generation ever born with a 1977 birthday).
But it is those same traits that have Generation Y also known as the “Peter Pan Generation” and the “Boomerang Generation” because the “Baby Boomers” have seen us with perceived up-turned nose at adulthood, dodging responsibilities and running up college tuition costs. And in short: They don’t like it. And there is a lot of truth it. Since the early 2000s when the much-maligned Dot-com Bubble Burst took place unemployment levels have steadily risen. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports as of Oct. 1 the unemployment rate is a staggering 9.5 percent; a figure that says more than 15 million Americans are looking for work.
But why should we care about the national unemployment rate? We’re in college. Being unemployed or working part-time jobs is a way of life and work has always been a fluid situation.
However, one day we’ll graduate college, don the cap and gown and make the long walk to that podium. You’re told once you get done with all the festivities, the grad parties, the photo-ops and grandiosity of that oh so happy day you will have the knowledge, confidence and skills to brave the world.
So, why do you feel like they’re lying to you?
Don’t worry it’s not just you. There’s a legion of post-undergraduates who have found out the hard way the real world isn’t what they expected or were told it was going to be. Once they left the friendly confines — or prison — of a college campus, they found out employers don’t care about their grade point average. They do care that you have an undergraduate degree from an accredited institution. They also care about how much experience you have in the job you are applying for, what your references say about you and how you’re willing to work for, especially in a job that will always ask more of you than you would ask of yourself — or anyone else for that matter.
But you’re resilient. You’d have to be to make it through four years of narcissistic professors, at least one grueling 16 to 18 hour schedule, and a part-time job that should pay you for putting up with the uneducated assistant manager. After enduring countless all-nighters and graduating, you realize there aren’t any jobs and you’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on 125 to 150 hours in some masochistic fashion.
OK, I’ll admit it; I thought finding a job after college was going to be easy. I went job hunting and instead of finding the coveted and lucrative 9-5 job, I am in grad school with five writing gigs that leave me sleeping a whole four hours a day and not necessarily at night either. No one wanted my fancy diploma. Employers wanted the professional experience of a 30 year old.
Naturally, this perplexed me, so I started digging for answers. I needed to know why no one wanted to hire me to set their magazine, newspaper or website on fire with extended features, columns and reviews. I have actively looked into this mess that forms right after graduating college.
I wanted to try to figure out why Generation Y is having such a hard time breaking into the real world and getting its foot in the door. What I did next was what we in the journalism profession call “investigating” or “chasing leads,” but that sounds a little too Dick Tracy for my taste. Suffices to say, I talked with 22-to 30-year-old graduates to find out what they believe is going on. Then I questioned the academic guild to see where they believe the problem lies. I consider my findings to be interesting, intuitive and practical.
Part 2
If you told Bryan Ogden he’d be living out his mid-20s in the Fukushima Prefecture, just a couple hours north of Tokyo he probably would have given you a silly look, laughed about it and offered to have lunch with you. But that’s exactly where he is and he loves it.
“It is much like California in that within a few hours I can have mountains, beaches, lakes, a major city and parks,” Ogden said.
A typical day for Ogden includes teaching native Japanese citizens to read and write the English language. They range in age from seven to 45 years old and have had varying degrees of English language education already. His job takes him all over Japan and can be spontaneous at times, though he doesn’t mind it.
“Sometimes I will work from noon to nine without much of a break,” Ogden said. “But other days, I will have a two-hour session during the day, and then one later in the evening.”
Ogden has done his best to keep things as simple and as he can, but the Japanese culture took some getting used to for him.
He uses the Japanese rail system to get around on the rare occasions that he can’t get to his destination by walking.
“I don't have a car, so most of my traveling is done on foot, by train, or by taxi. I only take a cab for business since it's very expensive,” Ogden said. “The train is pretty inexpensive and is extremely reliable. The best part is that it isn't necessary to have a car. Any important things are within a 10 to 15 minute walk.”
How Ogden went from being a college senior in Oklahoma plotting out a future in marketing and advertising to teaching English in Japan actually has a very simple answer. Like most graduating college seniors he needed a job.
By his own admission, Ogden had a pretty normal college experience. During his four years he joined a fraternity, made friends, partied, studied enough to make decent grades and if he had to do it all over again, he doesn’t believe he would do anything differently. He never expected to live his mid-20s out the way many college students envision. It has become increasingly obvious that his view of the college afterlife is a sentiment that is spreading.
Ogden majored in advertising at the University of Tulsa and was interested establishing connections, networking among friends and professors and looking for a way to establish himself for life after graduation.
“I never expected to get the white picket fence and two cars that everyone expects immediately following college,” he said. “I knew that life would be work, and that I had to be persistent to get what I wanted.”
Most people would see this as a manifesto of sorts. A kind credence that parents and teachers would be proud to hear from America’s future movers and shakers. Ogden though, is a realist, not an idealist. “Life following college only proved me right,” he said.
After receiving his degree in 2006, Ogden started out with all the zeal of a new college graduate as a marketing manager. After logging 12 hour days for a year and getting engaged, he realized he didn’t like the direction his current occupation was taking him he decided it was time to open his own business as an advertising consultant in January 2007.
“I sometimes had to work two part-time jobs to make enough money to continue to push on with my business, but once I got the hang of all the work that needed to go into it, it started to come more easily,” Ogden said.
After a year he found his work was steady but, but not enough to make a decent living.
“I decided that I really wanted to be traveling rather than to sit at home and spend the best years of my life building something that wasn’t going to be fulfilling to me,” Ogden said.
He didn’t go backpacking through Europe in search of hostels, hydroponics and hi-jinks or join the Peace Corps so his life would serve a higher purpose. Instead, Ogden made connections, wrote queries and networked.
“I started researching available positions overseas. I decided that for an overseas position, with my personality, that English was probably my biggest asset, so I used that,” he said. “I applied for numerous positions, following up with each regularly.”
Within a few months he landed his current job teaching in Japan. He has liked his job from the outset and has plans to stay in Tokyo for at least the duration of his contract.
After chatting with Ogden, one can understand why he takes the initiative in his personal and professional life.
“My situation was one where I had to figure my life out really early. Broken home and my parents weren't ever there,” Ogden said. “I had to work to feed myself since I can remember, and always got irritated when I saw my friends getting everything they ever wanted for doing nothing.”
Because of his upbringing he believes he was and is in a better position than his peers to succeed. He takes the position of most Baby Boomers when he thinks about how many post-college graduates feel the world owes them a job or is in anyway responsible for their well being.
“Now that we are all graduated or graduating, it seems that I was better prepared to make it on my own, and they don't understand how I'm doing so well,” Ogden said. “You just gotta take what you can get now, and invest in your own life for the possibilities of a better future. There will be crap jobs.”
He believes the problem does not lie in the lack of jobs or a suffering economy, but in college students learning to swallow their pride and take what they may not think they’re worth when beginning a career. “Each person is the author of their own life, and it is their responsibility to make it a good story,” Ogden said. “The jobs exist. People just need to look for them, and be willing to settle for much less than they are now.”
He acknowledges that recent college graduates are joining an experienced population that is too big for the current economy.
“What complicates that even more is the fact that you have so many unemployed, with experience, that are willing to work for much less than they are actually worth.”
Sarah Tomecek, a 23 year-old graduate of Trinity University in San Antionio, was all set to become a high school Spanish teacher after graduation. Tomecek thought her happiness would come from a steady job and income. She was wrong.
Tomecek quickly quit teaching and spent more than a year working jobs that she made fit her, but those didn’t make her happy or fulfill her as a person either. Now, she is actively looking for an occupation that fits her.
“I think some kids feel too pressured to grow up and find the ‘perfect fit.’ The middle and upper classes believe because it is socialized into us from the moment we are born that we are meant to be something great – and if not enjoy what we do then at the very least gain recognition and/or large sums of money for it,” Tomecek said.
The life after college taught to recent college graduates is not the reality of the college afterlife.
“We are lead down a path from kindergarten on through college knowing exactly what is expected of us,” Tomecek said. “When we receive that worthless little diploma we have no neon arrow pointing us in the very best direction.”
Tomecek is working toward a degree in nursing. She believes her calling in life is to help people. And helping people makes her happy.
Robyn, a 33-year-old married mother of two has expressed similar views to Tomecek. “While college is obviously liberating and academic and all that yin-yang, it protects a lot of kids from having to grow up,” Robyn said. “Then, once graduation comes around, that realization that oh, crap I have to go get a job and find a place to live sets in. A lot of people aren't ready for [real life] yet.”
Robyn has worked as a high school English teacher in Tulsa for five years and seen firsthand the effects of pressure at home. Along with the lessons of Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger and Nathaniel Hawthorne she teaches students not to be afraid of making mistakes and encourages them to look to the things that make them happy.
“If we think of our life in four distinct phases, there's child, young adult, adult, elderly, then I'm sorry, but the current model means that there's an imbalance because we spend too much time at the adult and elderly phase and not enough time as a child or young adult,” Robyn said. “That nurture time is being cut short.”
As a parent, Robyn can see the problem with recent college graduates moving back in with their parents, but she also sees virtue in giving them a place to regroup, gain their bearings and brave the world. Putting an emphasis on giving young adults time to grow is an ideal she wishes more individuals would embrace and practice.
In Robyn’s eyes, this is another way to increase the strength of family dynamics and one she herself may employ in the future.
“I'm all for my kids staying until they've saved some money, have a good job lined up or have met someone and will be stable,” Robyn said. “But best believe [my children] will be chipping in around the house. I hope to raise my kids so that they will be willing to do that, they will see everyone has to contribute to make a family and a household work.”
An article in The New York Times Magazine describes the 20s “as a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there.” The article also cites “One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch.”
In February, Dr. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett wrote an article for the Huffington Post about the reality of most young adults in their early 20s. He believes today’s young adults view themselves more as “international citizens” rather than the shiftless creatures.
“Today, the empathy of emerging adults is broadening to encompass an ever-larger circle of humanity…But how can they be the Empathic Generation? What about the popular stereotype that they are actually selfish slackers who are so absorbed in their electronic cocoons that they have little or no interest in the people within their own household, much less the whole world?” he wrote. “The stereotype may actually be true for a small proportion of them, but it is unfairly applied to them as an age group and a generation. On the contrary, this is a generation who is volunteering in record numbers for organizations like the Peace Corps, Americorps, and Teach for America.”
He could very well have a point. Because of some of President Barack Obama’s more radical policies when it comes to higher education we are seeing more global cooperation amongst the America’s youth than ever before. Tuition reimbursement and loans forgiven are new incentives for those with mounting college debt and could very well lead to a better, smarter more driven America. But, how many business, film studies and engineering majors are going to college so they can teach for the United States Government for the next 10 years or live as lavishly as an Amish woman in the Peace Corps? It’s not that it doesn’t happen, only that it doesn’t happen nearly as much as the U.S. government and the growing legions of Baby Boomers would like to believe.
Walking through the third floor of Kaufman Hall on the OU campus is like walking through the movie set for “Grease.” The halls are narrow and smell of formaldehyde. The aging linoleum floor is in desperate need of a face lift and the walls are covered with posters, bulletin comic strips, bumper stickers and ephemera to from the world to remind you that you about the world. It is beyond one such bulletin board of political wisecracks and pro-feminist slogans and unflattering statements about former President George W. Bush that I found Dr. Trina L. Hope.
Hope argued that the dynamics are changing in what she and others sociologists call the ‘Young Adulthood’ state of life. Adulthood is right now in the process of redefining what it is to be an adult and what steps must be taken to achieve adulthood.
“What you have had happened over the past 50 years is a divergence of how people live in America depending on whether they’re working class or middle class and the gap between people with college degrees and without college degrees has gotten much, much bigger. It’s just a function of the changing economy,” Hope said. “A whole group has lost the ability to have a decent job that allows them to support themselves and their families. And what have replaced those manufacturing jobs are service jobs and those jobs just don’t pay. Education has become the great divide.”
It is a longer and more grueling pathway than it has been before, because jobs that were around nearly a half-century ago no longer exist in America and the demand for workers has plummeted.
Education is no longer a luxury, but an essential ingredient in the recipe for success in the 21st century, especially for men.
“In the 1950s the average age for newly married couples was really, really young,” Hope said. “The transition to adulthood [for men] was much easier. A man could graduate from high school. He could get a job in a factory that would pay him well enough to get married, buy a home and he could start a family. But that’s not the world that we live in anymore. Those jobs that made the transition easier are pretty much gone.”
Contributing to the chaos is the fact pay for men has remained stagnant for nearly 40 years.
“Men’s wages as a whole since the 1970s have been flat. They have not gone up. College educated men are the only men who have seen their wages rise, but most men are not college educated,” Hope said. “The percentage of the population with a four year degree is only about 27 percent.”
It is important to point out here that the vast majority of Americans believe they are well-educated and while this might be true the percentage of four-year university graduates does not reflect that feeling.
Marriage used to be seen as the first step toward adulthood now it is simply the crowning star on a very well decorated Christmas tree.
“Marriage was your first launching point into adulthood whereas now the expectation is that you have to become an adult first and then you can get married,” Hope said. “The difference now is it’s hard to become an adult because you pretty much have to go to college to have a real good job. It takes longer and more credentials to become an adult which is someone with a steady job and a reliable income.”
This coupled with the fact only in the past 50 years have women been able to explore what it is to have a real good job.
“Now women have more opportunities than they have had in previous years,” Hope said. “Women for the most part work too. So, now you have two halves of the couple that wants to get their schooling done, get jobs and establish themselves before they get married. For a lot of couples co-habitation has replaced marriage. Being educated increases your chances of getting married.”
This makes sense because educated individuals are highly sought after as partners. No one wants to marry anyone dumber than they are.
Hope extinguished a frame of thinking that has spread like a grease fire that presumes GenerationY to be the laziest American generation yet.
“It wasn’t as if a whole generation of kids woke up and decided ‘Hey I’m just gonna be a slacker.’ These changes occur because something big in society occurs and of course that big thing that occurred was that change in economy from a manufacturing economy to a more technology service based economy,” Hope said. “If you were a part of the technical side of the economy, that’s great, but if you’re asking ‘Would you like fries with that?’ it’s tough way to live.”
Hope acknowledged that for as many problems and roadblocks there are for Generation Y, there are as many opportunities.
“The path to adulthood was much simpler in the past. This generation has so many more choices,” she said. “Today’s generation of young people are entering a world that is completely different than previous generations. The reality today is that you have to accomplish a lot more before you are ready to start your adult life.”
It has become clear that more of the United States population is going back to college to earn a degree of some sort but, eventually jobs are going to be needed for those eggheads walking around with bachelor, master and doctorate degrees. Hope underscores creating those jobs as the challenge for the recovering economy.
“We have to create the industry to supply all those educated people with jobs.”
There are two unequivocal economical truths the traditional college kid can count on. The first is that those who graduate college have an exceedingly better chance of living a better life. The second is that they will learn from their undergraduate degree what it is they are and are not capable of. The second is exceedingly more important than the first.
Safety nets are built in to every college curriculum for this reason. Some schools call them “block courses” others call them “general curriculum,” still others stick the old fashioned “elective” as the term of endearment for these courses designed to get undergraduates out of their element and make them feel as uncomfortable as possible.
Sometimes it works and the egghead finds out that she is much better fiction writer than structural engineer or the anthropology geek figures out he can use his knowledge of people and culture in the business world — where he’ll actually make a buck.
However, for the most part, these classes teach majority of college kids they have no interest in these other intro courses they absolutely must take to graduate and in effect cool their high completely. And it works the other way too. I’ll bet not too many Humanities professors get a kick out of trying to explain to the Hard Science crowd why they should study Nietzsche, Tao, Kierkegaard and John Rawls. The fact is, most of that crowd doesn’t care and if they did they would study that and not immerse themselves in thermodynamics, differential equations and Newton’s inescapable Law of Gravity.
After learning what they like and love most about life in the four walls of a college classroom, learning about themselves by patronizing rambunctious frat parties and coping with the fact that they were bequeathed by their parents to the nearest four year purgatory, Generation Y college kids have still proven to be tougher and more arduous than the generations that came before them. Less opportunities, more college students and a growing need for more education and professional development among the workforce has presented the country with problems that have yet to be seen and a need for a working solution is at its peak.
Some agree that parents are the issue and recent college graduates have to take responsibility for themselves after college, it remains true that college seniors are finding it increasingly hard to find jobs in the current economic climate. They are slowly learning the reality of the college afterlife is: it’s equally as important as to what you know as it is who you know.
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suckermom 1 year, 5 months ago
I find my college education to be even less important in the real world than years before. Who you know has been and will always be more important than what you know. Nothing in a core course, taught by many a sanctimonious professor, has ever help me to get one job. This generation, though they feel that they are wise, are far more coddled and indulged than generations before. They may also be more gullible and easily lead than the generations of the past. I have concerns for this nation under their leadership. But on the other hand, the previous generation may have said that about my generation too.