This is a very WASPish response. There is a generation of minorities who have been schooled in the new realities of America. Less jobs,less upward opportunities and a hard scrabble existence has been the American reality for millions. The international corporation mentality views America as just another customer and a source of overpaid workers. They have been abandoning our shores for a long time. They will continue to do so ,if they get back on their feet after poor economic decisions have crippled them. We are no longer the economic chosen people.
I have no idea what you just said.
I think I get what gonzomax is saying. The quarter-life crisis seems to exist primarily among well-off white folks. The rest of us can’t afford one. It would be interesting to know how many 25-year-olds actually have a 4 year college degree, especially from a private college as opposed to a state university. For every 25-year-old liberal arts grad complaining about temping in an expensive city, there are probably 4 25-year-olds serving in the military, taking their kids to daycare, working towards an associate’s degree at a community college, or just busting their butts at a blue or pink collar job.
Well, I was busting along in a low paying dead end job and I found time to be agnsty when I saw 30 on the horizon
I think this is probably a pretty accurate statement. The steotypical QLC scenario generally consists of young graduate from a relatively prestigeous college trying to “find themselves” in some expensive, trendy city like New York, Boston, San Fran, Chicago or Seattle. They usually are rejecting the influences of their parents, who are generally affluent suburbanites. Usually the parents are some combination of doctor, lawyer, banker, or other prestige job. Maybe the mom is a trophy wife. Our QLC victim usually has some low paying coffee shop or record store job (something not so proletariat as a job at McDonalds or WalMart). They don’t want to live their parents “bourgeois” lifestyle but they are frustrated by the high cost living and having to be tied to their parents financially because they don’t have a high paying corporate job.
Anyhow, these are the problems of people with money. Poor people don’t have the luxury of “finding themselves” or being unfullfilled in their jobs. They are too busy trying to make ends meet.
I can only relate my own experience, but for a lot of the people I’m friends with (I’m 30), it was maybe a little different than is being related here.
It was more a feeling that we worked our assess off only to end up further behind. We graduated from prestigious private universities, all with professional or other graduate degrees, moved to the “big city”. Basically, we were pursuing the dream.
Then we found out that our jobs (junior associates in corporate law firms, accountants and consultants for big firms, resident physicians) basically required our every waking hour, that between crushing student loans (most of my friends have anywhere from 100-200k), and soaring real estate prices, we were living in crappy apartments, often with roommates.
Meanwhile, we saw our old slacker friends who had just taken some generic job out of high school or college were working half as many hours, had more disposable income, and because they didn’t live in the trendy neighborhoods, had houses instead of studio apartments.
I’ve had the same conversation a dozen times with my high-achiever friends: “Were we suckers to do this?” Was it worth it?
I don’t know. I’m pretty happy with my lot in life, to be honest. But I’ve certainly asked myself these questions. That, to me, is the quarterlife crisis.
Spoiled brats will always be spoiled brats. This is no more reflective of my generation than the baby boomers buying sports cars and eating out every night yet complaining that they won’t be able to afford retirement are reflective of those who work hard and save their money so that they don’t spend their last years living in a box eating cat food.
The very name “Generation X” was popularized by the eponymous Douglas Coupland novel about quarter-life angst. So the “quarter-life crisis” is not unique to the current generation.
Nearly everyone I know had a QLC. I had a pretty epic one, as some of you may remember.
I think the main cause of this is the insane price of tuition. Tuition prices have risen ten fold in the past 30 years. Faster than just about anything else. This means:
[ol]
[li]People no longer are able to “work their way through college.” Even if they do hold a job, it doesn’t make much of a dent in what they are spending. So they miss out on a valuable education on what it means to make your own money and support your own lifestyle. They also sometimes miss out on the first steps of the career ladder. [/li][li]People graduate with crushing debt. They can’t afford to take the low-paid jobs typically found at the start of the career ladder. They can’t afford to move to a place where job prospects might be better. They are frustrated that they end up having to take the first job they can find, which often is a dead end job. They don’t see how they can possibly get their career and future started when the jobs they are finding and forced to take are going nowhere. [/li][li]People spend a lot longer relying on their parents. Few fresh graduates can make the payments on their, say, 40k debt. So their parents help them. This makes people feel guilty and trapped. [/li][/ol]
We spend our entire childhoods being told that if we just dream big and work hard, our dreams will come true. We do that to get into college and it works. So we work hard in college thinking the transition to the working world will be much the same. It’s a harsh wake up call the day after graduation, when you find you owe a shitload of money, your dreams are nowhere in sight, and you just got booted off your parent’s health insurance. Nothing in our lives up to that point had given us an warning about how drastically and quickly our lives were about to change.
The root problem: Far too many people go to college. We have an ‘education bubble’. You can see it in skyrocketing tuitions, the devaluing of college degrees, and this whiny nonsense from 25 year olds.
Back in the day, when you went to school you either liked to work with your hands, in which case you might go to a technical high school or take shop or something, and ultimately go to work in a good trade like plumber, electrician, auto mechanic, or whatever. This was a respectable path for anyone to take, and it led to a decent middle class life. It also provided plenty of opportunity for upward mobility, as many people became contractors or started small businesses.
But the boomers came along, and decided that their children just HAD to go to college. It doesn’t matter if you’re only an average or slightly below average student, it doesn’t matter that you have no interest in academic subjects, college is the road for anyone who wants to be successful in life. Or so the kids were told.
To that end, the government jumped in with student loan programs, special tax-free savings programs for parents to send their kids to school, subsidies, etc. And the culture changed - a working trade is something to be sneered at. No one wants their kid to be an electrician any more.
So off everyone went to college. Half the kids there have no business being there. They don’t care about the material, don’t know what they want to do, and wind up shuffling through with some general liberal arts degree or whatever the easiest, most interesting looking path is that they can find.
This surge in demand for college drove tuition prices through the roof. So now kids have to nearly bankrupt themselves early in life and saddle themselves with 10-20 years of debt just to get this education.
And since everyone’s got the piece of paper, it doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore, so lots of people are coming out of college with 100K in debt, a sheepskin, and no job prospects. We didn’t do them any favors by telling them college was a must.
And on the working class front, those jobs are now being filled by immigrants or people who aren’t even able to do a good job at that level of work. So now you have shoddy construction practices and tradesmen making 100K a year in some places while people with 4-year degrees are pounding pavement hoping to find a 35K/yr job.
So here’s a hint: If you are poor, and you’re only an average student, and you don’t have a burning desire to be an engineer, or a doctor, or a teacher, or a nurse, strongly consider junior college or working your way into a good trade. Your life will be better for it.
I’m still reading one - it’s called the SDMB.
Mechanics and construction laborers can still make a living. But illegal workers from Mexico are cutting wages and that time is short. The old auto assembly plant that would allow a person who just wanted to work and not commit to a lifetime of education and competition is evaporating. American wages across the board are dropping rapidly. The old bullshit mantra of hard working inventive American workers being the worlds best is gone. We are just a work force and a market to international corporations. our wages will drop to the levels of other countries . We will owe an educational mortgage when we graduate from college. It will take many years to pay bit off.
I think in the future this problem will only get worse.
Since everyone can get a BA, people are now looking for master’s degrees, even for pretty basic middle management stuff. Soon the only people we are going to see with in offices with BA’s are secretaries (a job that used to be filled perfectly well by high school grads.) 80% of these jobs have absolutely no use for the specialized knowledge that post-grad degrees focus on. It’s just the latest and greatest way of keeping the lower classes out of the decent jobs.
Everyone needing an advanced degree of course means more debt, less real-world experience, and more whining. We are going to bump the QLC up a few years and shove people even deeper into the thick of adulthood with no money and no life experience.
Personally, I think we need to do two things. The first is bring tuition down. The price of tuition is completely and totally out of line with anything comparable. A good place to start would be to strip off the “country club” aspect of college. My school offered gyms, rec programs, activities, lounges, free movie nights, councilors, career center, women’s centers, GLBT centers, transfer student centers, radio stations…well these things are nice. But I’m still paying this stuff off and I certainly can’t afford any of this stuff now. If I had even known what was going on I would have been pissed that I couldn’t just pay for the classes instead of investing tens of thousands of dollars to live in a posh bubble for four years.
Secondly, we need to make school hard. You’d have to actively try not to pass college. No wonder the degree means nothing. And lets base prestige on what colleges are harder, not what colleges are more expensive.
It’s not really to keep the lower classes out of jobs. A liberal arts degree used to have value in that it at least told the employer that the degree holder was of higher than average intelligence, and capable of sticking through a difficult task for four years. So it had value in selecting out the best employees, even if what they learned in college had no applicability to the job.
But now that many colleges are basically extensions of high school, and any warm body can get through, the degree loses its discriminatory value. Now it’s a Masters that separates the wheat from the chaff.
It used to be that a fancy liberal arts degree was a luxury enjoyed by the rich, because before there were student loans and government grants and all the rest, college was hard work and a huge commitment. Your family had to save and sacrifice to put you through, you might have to work evenings and weekends and summers, and as a result everyone knew that it was to be taken seriously and that you had better study something that had good job prospects when you got out. That’s still the attitude in poorer countries, which is why the engineering and medicine programs are filled with immigrants and foreign students, and the art history and women’s studies and navel-gazing classes are filled with suburban American kids.
It’s not just the resources. Many universities are amazingly expensive in terms of building quality and furnishing and other luxuries. Universities will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on paintings, murals, and sculptures. Many of their buildings look like bloody palaces, with fine oaks and glass and steel and expensive architecture and huge open rotundas and all the rest. All of this paid for on the backs of young people who can barely afford Kraft Dinner.
But you have to understand why tuition inflation happens - it’s pure supply and demand. We’ve pushed too many kids into college, and the demand for colleges have skyrocketed. The colleges respond by raising their tuition.
When I went to university, all I got for my money was the chance to sit in lecture halls with hundreds of other students and hear lectures. My profs were rarely available - they shuffled off most of the student interaction on TA’s. Books were absurdly expensive. There was no way that I was getting my tuition’s worth of services. But I’ll bet it helped build one killer of a faculty lounge.
People don’t realize just how expensive a college education is. It’s not just the tuition, but the removal of yourself from the work seniority ladder for four years, the opportunity cost of not earning a salary for that length of time, and the lost on-the-job education.
Take two people - one goes into a good trade - say, an electrician. The other goes to college. The electrician starts off as an apprentice, but by the time the four years go by he’s a journeyman, maybe a job foreman. He’s making $60-70K a year, has a credit history, and maybe even owns a house. The college student comes out with no job experience, 100K in debt, no credit history, and if he’s got a general arts degree, he’ll be lucky to find a job paying half what the electrician makes.
The electrician has also already been paying into a retirement plan for four years, most likely. If he’s working for a large company he’s got job security and a skill set that will always be in demand. The college kid may wind up working in a crappy office job with no retirement plan. Even assuming that the college kid may ultimately wind up making more than the electrician, he’s starting so far behind that it may take him a lifetime to catch up.
But you have to understand the perverse incentive at work. Society has decided that every kid deserves a college education. There’s no room for flunking people out just because they’re not smart enough. That wouldn’t be egalitarian.
Here in Alberta, we instituted a writing competency exam for freshmen - you had to pass it, and you got three chances at it. Flunk it the first time, and you had to take ‘bonehead English’ in your first year. Then you had until the end of year two to pass, and if you didn’t, you had to leave college.
I was a marker for that exam. It was extremely easy - you simply had to write a 400 word essay on one of several topics that were given to you. You were allowed quite a few spelling and grammatical errors before you failed. The main thing we were looking for was whether you could express yourself - if you could make an argument and follow it through for four hundred words without totally mangling the language, you passed.
It caused a big problem, because so many students were failing it. As in, something like 20% of all students couldn’t pass this exam. So what did we do? Require more English classes? Revamp the high school English curriculum to prepare them better? Accept that perhaps 20% of the kids in university really shouldn’t be there?
No, all of that would have been too difficult or politically incorrect. So instead we just dropped the exam. Better to just put your head in the sand and pretend the problem is gone.
You should have seen some of these essays. These are by kids accepted into a good college, and in their second year, AFTER passing bonehead English. I’ll give you the flavor of what many were like:
Seriously, I read dozens of essays that were easily that bad. Most of those people now have college degrees.
Got cites for this bit of pop sociology? In particular, what time period are you referring to as “back then”?
In 1955, for example, a year’s tuition and fees at Harvard University was $800. My advisor, who attended Harvard at that time, noted that it was feasible for many students to put themselves through school with summer and part-time work.
(And the “hard work” part is debatable too, considering the notoriety of such concepts as the “gentleman’s C”. Sure, you could work hard at college, but many students back then didn’t really bother, just as some don’t bother nowadays.)
The reason that most non-wealthy people didn’t attend college back then wasn’t that it was impossible to pay for it or hard to pass it; it’s that it just wasn’t a practical choice. As you noted later in your post, when lots of skilled trades and business positions are open to people without college degrees, spending four years studying a college classical curriculum is primarily a waste of earning potential. And having a degree (without the wealth and social position that usually accompanied it) didn’t necessarily increase your earning potential later in life either. A college-educated teacher was seldom likely to make more money than a successful businessman who’d started work at 16.
It “used to be” that you went to college if (a) you wanted to enter one of the professions, i.e., medicine, law, teaching, or the ministry; (b) you were well-to-do and/or a member of an elite social group where college education was the norm; or © you happened to have a real taste for scholarship for its own sake. For most other people, a college degree wasn’t a desired but unattainable luxury so much as it was simply a pointless diversion
Fiddlesticks. What happened with the children of the baby boomers in the '80s and beyond is that the “wage premium” for a college degree skyrocketed. Automation, globalization, and anti-union government policies started making many blue-collar jobs more precarious, and the payoff for having a college degree that supposedly qualified you for a white-collar job correspondingly increased.
The “degree inflation” of the past few decades wasn’t initiated by some random elitist impulse on the part of baby boomers. It was fundamentally a rational response to the economic realities that made blue-collar jobs less desirable.
I bullshit your fiddlesticks. When I was looking at colleges in the late 90s, this kind of “You must have a college degree because you have to” idea was alive and well with everyone.
The colleges were telling us how rich and successful and easy finding jobs in the 2000s with a college degree would be and my guidance counselor actually told me to forget considering Community College because “You’re too smart to go to Community College.” I was an arrogant shit and already thought that myself, but to hear it from a guidance counselor is just a shitty thing to do to a kid staring down the possibility of massive college loans.
Oh, I’m not saying that that idea didn’t end up making it into mainstream cultural prejudices, certainly by the late 90s. What’s fiddlesticks is Sam’s assertion that it started out as a cultural prejudice.
Ah, I can agree with that.
Its not gone, its just latent. But to be really honest, when you say the american worker your romantazing something that never was. American industry has time and time again proved that with the right conditions , it can move mountains.
If the right management team , given clear mandate can set up a mass production enviroment where all the workers have to do is to fit one or more parts onto what ever production interface , be it a pallet line , a car line , tank production facility , what ever and the end result will be mountains of product waiting to go to the logistic centers for distribution.
Given the right payscale , cause no money no funny, American workers will be the most productive
What I have noticed in my working career as a production worker, is that management at most companies tend to be the failures in their demographic. By that, I mean that their counterpart in the blue class would be skilled trades like milrights and electrical folks. By comparison in what they get paid. Before anyone nails me for concidering the trades folks as failures, far from it. They have gone to some sort of tech school, done an apprenticeship and have become journeymen. But for the most part they top out at between ninety and 120 k after overtime, where as a production supervisor will be roughly between 60 k to 150 k if he tops out as a plant manager.
For all the schooling the manager has gone through, he is overworked and probably underpaid. At any one time , there is a surplus of supervisors running around trying to land a job making their job enviroment a darwinian exercise. So the shit floats to the top as the ones with the longevity tend to be highly political or syncophantic. So for basically spending about as much money in university , our fictional plant manager will make 150 k in an average production facility , while someone who does financial can make upwards of 500 k in some cases.
For the average guy or girl looking at either an entry level service job, city college or university there is enough historical data right now to be able to do due diligence in what path they should persue. In the seventies a blue collar job with a pension was desirable , as some union jobs were paid more than doctors, that changed in the eighties and nineties as university educations were preferable for earnings, and now as we are in the aughts , we are being forced to come up with a new way of thinking , as blue collar jobs are not what they used to be and white collar jobs aren’t seen to be worth the money the education confers.
But the bottom line is that no one is stopping anyone from going out and opening their own little factory making widgets and thats what made American workers the best. That they can own their own place after they get tired of working for the man and becoming the man.
Declan
You’re a PUNK WHO NEEDS TO GET OFF MY LAWN! Just like everybody else born after 1980.