You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you read about the 2007 Amherst College graduate who moved to New York, where, according to Laura Vanderkam on the City Journal Web magazine, she “recently beat out 500 other applicants for a part-time job walking dogs.”
When baby boomers were kids, “You don’t know how easy you have it” was the opening salvo of a parental sermon on just about anything. Today no one raised in the hopeful ’50s and the bountiful ’60s dares tell a young person how easy they have it. The broken economy has gone a long way toward destroying the conditions that make it possible for young people to launch careers and build families.
According to a survey by Twentysomething Inc., 85 percent of students who finished college last May planned to live at home with their parents after graduating (up from 67 percent in 2006). Unemployment is at 15 percent or more for 20- to 24-year olds; 9.3 percent of young adults with college degrees are unemployed. Younger workers who have jobs are also more likely than older workers to have their hours cut back or their status changed to part-time.
Unemployment is bad enough if you’re debt-free, but most college graduates aren’t these days (see “Killer Loans,” October 14, 2010). Two-thirds of people who go to college borrow to go; on average, they come out owing over $21,000. When jobs were plentiful and salaries high, that level of debt spread over 10 years or more would have been manageable. Today job loss puts student loan borrowers at risk for default, a situation that can double, triple or quadruple their debt. Some are finding themselves in debt for life.
One immediate effect of this situation, and not a good one, is that recent college graduates and others in their 20s won’t be spending as much as people their age have traditionally spent—on weddings, on houses and furnishings, on children. That’s not good for the economy, according to economist Mark Zandi, who told the Los Angeles Times, “We need them to drive housing demand and consumer spending.”
And that doesn’t take into account the psychic difficulties faced by young adults who may be depending on parents they should be separating from, putting off marriage, postponing having children, or accepting jobs for which they’re overqualified. Older people, even amid financial difficulties, usually have internalized memories of productive, successful years; for the young, stymied just when they should be accumulating those memories, it’s a disheartening struggle.
