Academic

A MILLENNIAL CRI DE COEUR: InstaPundit reader McKean Evans emails in response to this Michael Baron?

By Glenn Reynolds

A MILLENNIAL CRI DE COEUR: InstaPundit reader McKean Evans emails in response to this Michael Barone post:

I’ve read your blog nearly every day since I was in high school (class of ‘04), when the 2000 election disputes and 9/11 really woke me up to the world of politics, and while I haven’t always agreed with you about everything, this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to write to you. So let me say in advance that for about ten years now I’ve been an avid reader and for the most part, very much appreciated what you’ve had to say. I’ve done my very best to avoid ranting and to produce a courteous and reasonably concise statement of why, longtime reader that I am, I’m frankly quite angry with some of your recent postings. Of course, you’re the one with the blog, you’ve got the right to your opinion, and it’s an opinion that I’ve had a great deal of respect for for a long time, so all I ask is that you think about what I have to say in the future.

There’s been a real trend in the blogosphere lately, among people with a variety of different views, to make arguments which run something along the lines of: “the Millennials are lazy, they had everything handed to them on a silver platter, they’re the byproducts of the cult of self-esteem and they’ve never had to work for anything before now, so why should we care if they have trouble finding work right out of school?” Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve always found a lot of what seems to characterize my generation as fairly repellent (Exhibit 1: /Jersey Shore/), and I think that there are a lot of very valid, very important criticisms to level at the the way in which our society has extended adolescence into (apparently) perpetuity, not to mention the wisdom of borrowing yourself into six figures of college debt. However, this new trend of shamelessly and self-righteously laying into 20-30 year olds who, for example, are forced to move back home after graduation because they can’t get a job, or who are forced to remain on their parents’ health insurance, is just counterproductive. Moreover, it’s incredibly insulting. New college graduates are among those most impacted by the recession, and they’re in the worst position to handle unemployment. We don’t have savings, or CD’s, or a 401(k), or home equity to fall back on. What we have is our parents. And make no mistake, nobody, but nobody, is excited to move back home with the folks.

Now of course it’s tempting to make the point that most of us wouldn’t be in this position if we hadn’t borrowed so heavily for school, and that’s absolutely a valid point. That’s a discussion that absolutely has to happen in our society. But it’s completely unjust and inappropriate to simply tell everybody who graduated in the past two years, who still can’t find steady work, that it’s their own damn fault. We weren’t of voting age when Congress decided it was a great idea to undermine the housing and financial sectors, by giving huge home equity loans to persons with no capacity to ever repay them. You wouldn’t have found us among those who blindly followed the financial gurus of the late 90’s and early aughts, who just /knew/ that you could buy a house and that its value would increase forever. You definitely wouldn’t have found us working for the UAW, while the unions bled the heart of the manufacturing sector dry over the past thirty years.

But I’ll tell you where you would have found us over the past ten years, while the stage was being set for everything to go to hell. We were at school, in the library, doing exactly what we were supposed to be doing. And if there’s one great sin of my generation, it’s that we blindly listened to everything that our parents and teachers told us about the value of a college education, of a “liberal arts” degree, and the risks of heavy student loan debt. To grow up in the late 1990’s and in the aughts was to be constantly inundated with the importance, the absolute necessity of Almighty Higher Education. I started hearing about planning for college when I was around 13, and my parents were comparatively very laid back. For the vast majority of people who are now in their 20’s, adolescence wasn’t about anything at all but getting in to college. Our teachers talked about College the way that Churchill talked about Victory. I’ve long argued that the reason why popular culture among young adults today is so obnoxiously, insufferably adolescent is at least partly due to the fact that we were never /allowed/ to be adolescents. You didn’t play sports or write for the school newspaper or volunteer at the soup kitchen because you wanted to, you did it to pad that college application. I can’t tell you how many times I was told, point blank, that the way to success was to get into the best college you could, and borrow as much money as you could to pay for it. Of /course/ college was worth six figures in debt. To even ask the question was unthinkable for most of us, because we had never been allowed to consider the possibility that it might be otherwise.

So now we’ve just graduated, and the fact is that there are simply no jobs. I myself graduated in May from a very competent, middle-of-the-road law school, and probably around 75% of my class is unemployed. And I can tell you first hand that none of them are happy about moving back in with the folks. They’re not doing it because they’re too lazy to support themselves, they’re doing it because they’re looking at 150-200k in student loans and no employment. When I say “no employment” I don’t mean a lack of big-law, 100k associate employment. I don’t even mean that we’re having trouble getting the clerkships and government jobs that the ivy league law schools so despise. I mean nothing–there are simply no jobs.

Did my generation grow up with unreasonable expectations about life, employment, and the value of a degree? Absolutely. But before you’re so quick to judge us, please remember that for the vast, vast majority of our admittedly short lives, we worked intensely hard to do what we were told was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, by absolutely everybody in authority. The worst you can really say about us is that we did what we were told when we were children.

Yeah, it’s a really tough jobs environment out there right now. And Barone’s comments, while correctly observing a trend, are somewhat at odds with his book Hard America, Soft America, which says that America has the worst 18-year-olds and the best 30-year-olds in the industrialized world.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on June 15, 2010 (boomark / email).