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This Is What Happens When A Millennial Tries To Get A Job
In “Global Youth Unemployment Hits 35 Million As Recent Grads Lean On Parents,” we documented what we have called the “pitiable plight” of recent college graduates whose degrees now cost in excess of $35,000 and who are entering a job market bereft of real opportunities for gainful employment. The OECD estimates that in member countries, as many as 35 million people aged 16-29 are out of work. In a related story, Sallie Mae (from which the nation’s number-one issuer of student loan-backed ABS was spun last year) recently reported that better than two-thirds of parents expect to provide financial support to their children post-graduation. With this in mind, consider the following data on youth unemployment in the US.
From Generation Opportunity (a nonprofit):
- The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds, which adjusts for labor force participation by including those who have given up looking for work, is 13.8 percent (NSA). The (U-3) unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds is 7.9 percent (NSA).
- The declining labor force participation rate has created an additional 1.828 million young adults that are not counted as “unemployed” by the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not in the labor force, meaning that those young people have given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs.
- The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year old African-Americans is 19.6 percent (NSA); the (U-3) unemployment rate is 12.8 percent (NSA).
- The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year old Hispanics is 14.1 percent (NSA); the (U-3) unemployment rate is 9 percent (NSA).
- The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year old women is 11.7 percent (NSA); the (U-3) unemployment rate is 7.5 percent (NSA).
“College graduates will spend the upcoming month looking toward their futures – but as they celebrate, their ability to get a job remains top of mind. Young people have seen their economic situation improve in 2015. While we’re glad for that, April’s jobs report still shows a 13.8 percent youth unemployment rate, a discouragingly high number for those who are hoping to embark on their careers in the next few weeks,” the group’s Director of Policy Engagement at Generation Opportunity Luke Kenworthy says.
“If you look at the numbers starting in 2009, we’ve been in the longest sustained period of unemployment since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting their data following World War II. This misconception that we don’t want jobs or that we’re lazy and entitled is nonsense,” a spokesman added, in a statement to Newsweek.
According to the OECD, one of the reasons recent graduates have so much trouble finding jobs is that their degrees aren’t preparing them for life in the workplace with 10% of new graduates displaying poor literacy skills and 14% exhibiting subpar numeracy skills.
But it’s not just the skills gap. College degrees (even graduate degrees) have become so commonplace (thanks in part to the proliferation of student loans) that they are no longer sufficient in and of themselves to guarantee their holders will find good jobs. One 25-year old who lives in the nation’s capital told Newsweek that even with her master’s degree, she has found waitressing is the better option in today’s job market:
Millennials face higher university tuitions and student loan debt than ever before, as well as stiffer competition when they enter the workforce. A 25-year-old who recently earned a master’s and is living with a friend in Washington, D.C., tells Newsweek she is waitressing while looking for a job better suited to her qualifications.“It’s hard,” she says. “They don’t want to pay you extra for your master’s. There are enough people with master’s degrees that they can require them.”
As a reminder...
Millennials have also discovered what we’ve been harping on for months: for most Americans, there simply is no wage growth.
Millennials are getting lower earnings compared with the nation’s median income, versus people of that age a decade ago. “We find that because of the difficulties facing millennials, they are delaying these important life decisions, like getting married, buying a home, starting a family,” Pasch says.
In a study by Carnevale’s center at Georgetown, the age at which young adults on average reach the median wage, across education levels, increased from 26 to 30 between 1980 and 2012. Those hardest hit were high school graduates and young men. Full-time employment for high school graduates declined 13 percentage points for the period, while the rate for university graduates declined by 8 points. As of 2012, young men earned only 58 percent of the mean wage, down from 85 percent in 1980.
Circling back to the issue of whether millennials are getting what they paid for (or, more appropriately, what they almost certainly didn't pay for and never will) from US colleges and universities, it's looking increasingly likely that the push to educate America's youth (spearheaded by easy access to borrowed money) may end up backfiring, as prospective students assess the difficulty recent graduates have had in finding jobs that are commensurate with their experience and ask themselves if four years of their lives and $35,000 in debt is really worth it. Here's Newsweek again:
Carnevale says graduates are feeling let down by their universities, even as the institutions jack up the cost of tuition. “I don’t know if you noticed,” he says, “but we have a debate raging in this country right now over whether universities are supposed to teach for enlightenment or to prepare students for the job market. You still see presidents at some very prestigious universities arguing for the former, not the latter.”
Of course that could be because graduates from "very prestigious universities" are often i) deeply connected thanks to family pedigree and ii) heavily recruited, making it easier for them to find jobs and thus rendering the distinction between teaching "enlightenment" and teaching hard skills less meaningful. Whatever the case, you can probably count "presidents at some very prestigious universities" unconcerned because as the following excerpt makes clear, they're doing just fine.
Via Bloomberg:
Ivy League presidential pay is looking more like the big leagues.
Columbia University paid President Lee Bollinger $4.6 million in 2013, a 36 percent increase from the year before, according to a tax filing released Tuesday. Yale University recently revealed it paid former President Richard Levin a bonus of $8.5 million when he retired in 2013 after 20 years.
Presidential pay at elite universities is increasingly resembling that of corporate America, with performance bonuses and exit packages. While colleges say the rewards reflect the complexity of running multi-billion-dollar organizations, professors, alumni and others have questioned whether it is appropriate for nonprofits.
Here to sum up what it's like to be a millennial with a newly-minted $35,000 degree hunting for a job in America is another recent graduate from the DC area who told Newsweek the following:
“You’re like, ‘I’ll do anything and apply for everything, but usually it’s an electronic filing and you’re spending all your time on it and never hear back. So far, I have applied for around 30 jobs, if not more, and have heard back on two of them. I didn’t get either job because I don’t have enough experience. These are entry-level jobs, but experienced people are taking them.”
Good luck millennials and remember, there's always the farm.
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You have a lot going for you and your advice is sound. The one thing lacking is bit of empathy and understanding. With it you will go far in life. Without it you will find few to lend you a helping hand as you climb the Corporate ladder. Good luck with your choises.
......and even fewer as you descend the corporate ladder...
Outside of your amazing avatar, everything you said at best classifies as sophistry.
Simple? Ha.
I make just under 6 figures, I'm 27. You and I are very clearly exceptions, not rules. A lot of my friends work hard, aren't stupid, and are struggling. It's easy to look from a survivorship bias point of view and say shit is "simple".
This nonsense has been happening to STEM grads for much longer than just prior to 2009. When the tech sector collapsed in the early 2000s, tech firms fired huge numbers of very talented people, and eventually replaced them with foreigners on the H-1B visas. A few token young grads were hired at Google/Facebook, but most STEM grads from the decade of the 2000s are unemployed or underemployed, and even relatively basic entry-level positions can receive thousands of applications. Making it effectively impossible for top talent to differentiate itself amidst the sea of resumes.
Had the 2000s had sustainable employment growth of US citizens during the tech sector 'recovery', I am pretty sure that we wouldn't have seen the sort of economic calamity that has beset the economy over the past decade.
At what point does America turn into Bangkok where the hottest chicks in your class end up behind a glass window eagerly waiting for fat, stinking old men to select them for an hour of hard core sex - and offering a bonus for a rim job.
In some places we're already there.
Hopefully tomorrow.
//s//
A fat, stinking old man with lots of one-dollar bills in his pocket.
It's about the time.
Yahoo had a photo of a new female appearing robot in Japan which greets customers.
In a few decades or less real women will be supplanted by robots performing in the world's oldest profession, so even that means of making a dolar will be taken away.
Choose your college major wisely.
The answer is simple. Most jobs that are in existence today are not necessary for our survival as a species.
Can you honestly say your job contributes directly to feeding, clothing or sheltering people?
I am not speaking about making money.
So many jobs created today are for convenience purposes or to comply with regulation or bureaucracy or for amusement.
Smartphones are nice, but 15 years ago we survived without them.
If 50% of today's workers lost their jobs, other than the flow of income, no one would notice.
One century ago bodies were needed to plant and harvest food, bring it to market and so on. There were many more people making their own clothes, building their own homes and so on. From milking machines to agriculture equipment that can do in a day what machines fifty years ago would take forever to do we have been replaced by technology.
We are becoming obsolete, even in warfare where the killing of people is predominant, machines can do a better job without conscience.
We will lose this battle to have any purpose for existing unless this tide is turned or dealt with.
Thoughtful comment.
My job deals with research in manufacture and in killing machines. The company i work for doesnt plan on solving any problem but on finding ways to do the same with lower investment (mor deaths per dollar, more trinkets per invested dollar). That isnt really a "survival" thing although i kind of feel at the bottom, it is.
We are basically trying to find ways to fuck blue collar workers and exterminate them if they were to ever rebel, in a military way. Out with them in with us.
Five years ago, my youngest daughter finshed in UNC-CH with a BA in biology. No jobs, so she pitied herself for a while until her older sister told her to get off her ass (older sister never graduated from Alabama and now is the office manager and chief commditites trader for a recycling company while raising 2 chilluns).
So, she sucked it up and waited/cleaned tables at an Atlanta Bread Company store. In 15 months she was the GM of both stores in that town. She was taking accounting courses from a branch of a state univ and discovered by the local manager of a VA Hospital. She was hired on a contract a year or so ago to coodinate the patient backlog audit at that hospital with their intent to send her to get her Masters in Accuntancy (next year) in return for 5 yrs. Along the way, she saved enough to buy a house and save her now husband from addiction.
At age 33 she'll have a CPA with govt experience and will tell them thanks and move on. And discovered what a bag the govt was.
There are so many opportunities this 62 year old never had today back then - this jobs shit is due to the immense sense of entiltement the 20-somethings have.
tits and entertainment
Puleez, this certainly isn't the case here in the northeast.. In Boston & NYC, the job market is booming -- as I said before (which seemed to rub some the wrong way) - someone who has a college degree and is white or Asian between the ages of 22-35 and not obese needs little more than a pulse to find a decent paying (at least $80,000 a year) job.. Ever notice who has most of the white collar jobs and who works in the 'service' industry ?? The contrast along racial (and age) lines is telling..
I highly doubt that, and even $80k ain't shit in those cities.
then how do they afford apartments that rent for $2000 and up, eating out literally every night and of course the tens of thousands in tattoo ink and spending say $200 + a month at some uber trendy gym like Crossfit?
Student loans? And a lot of people who consume those sorts of services spend a disproportionate amount of income on them. Even the new grads who do manage to find jobs often are receiving subsidies from their families -- yes, that's right, daddy is writing a cheque so they can live in the high cost centres on the poor quality jobs that are available. Large amounts of debt are prominent as well.
Actually outside of the finance industry and medicine, the 'service' sector often pays more than even the more junior white-collar jobs. And trades / personal services workers are cleaning up, relatively speaking (big consumers of the tattoos, btw). Priced out a hair cut relative to your salary lately?
One executive order from your moron on chief with moron on eu could change the world forever.. all city population over 500.000 have to build waste to energy plant.. it would half the unemployment, energy bill and the waste dumped in the ground, it would save the precious ground water. It would be the best jump start for economy ever, much more than QE ever done... price of metals would rise and so on.. even the banks could make money more than skimming a cent or two..
whos gonna finance this.. well we.. we own it to our children here and now...
disclaimer.. owning outotec stock
"The answer is simple. Most jobs that are in existence today are not necessary for our survival as a species."
THAT'S an excellent observation.
So LET ME tell you what the computer analyses say. Yes, they do exist!!! The computer analyses say - with consistent agreement - that our planet has OVERSHOT the number of people we can keep alive. Now, maybe it would be POSSIBLE to stave off disaster, if we actually created jobs that supported human life!! BUT as you correctly point out - a great many jobs (and most new investment!) is NOT DOING any such thing!
Would you care to gues WHERE this takes us?
CAN YOU begin to imagine ... how BAD the predictions actually look???
CAN YOU???
Obviously education has no longer purpose of getting job with skill acquired in college, so what education is actually for: NOTHING
But there is more interesting and longer answer:
https://contrarianopinion.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/education-blessings-o...
are they really being educated or just indoctrinated?
Adding insult to injury recent story reports that young and fussy millenials feel insulted when called "millenials." I know a college prof who had to be ultra sensitive when dealing with spoiled, super sensitive students when he had to explain why the kids were not geniuses and did not deserve an A or 4.0 grade. The children would often bring a parent into the prof's office to make a case for regrading a poorly graded student. At least many will graduate "knowing" that Global Warming is the worlds biggest problem
a college degree: the young adult "participation trophy".
There are a lot of issues. But, at the core, is US industry was offshored to make use of what amounts to slave labor. Then the bankers decided they don't need to make loans to anything that is not flashing a value on a screen 24/7.
Maybe someone needs to securitize small business loans so the bankers can bundle and trade them. Then they would be throwing money at the economy like the drunken idiots they are. If the loans are all bad, they like that even better.
This is what you get when you distort markets, dumb down students, fail to permit an honest political process, lie to the citizenry, make everything a crisis, hew to failed economic doctrines for your own agenda, confiscate private wealth for endless broken window wars, empower fiat loving central banksters and their elitist children of the night, etc cetera, ad nauseam.
Wealth is simply not getting to those who are meritorious by virtue of productivity and beneficial creativity. The only thing growing is the consummate enabler, big, tyrannical, Hegelian and intrusive government. The serious blood hasn't flowed yet. If it isn't stemmed then it will only get worse. Welcome back to 1984.
i will be 60. I have worked summer since age 12 and on the clock jobs during school year at 15. I have interviewed, hired and in some cases trained those willing to listen in that 25 to 30 year age range. Those willing to listen. Almost to a man they wanted 80 k a year and all expenses paid with full benefits and a 40 hour work week. I train closers. In home sales. First of every month at zero and you get paid what you are worth. You are available from 10 am to 8 pm five days a week and from 10 to 4 on saturdays. Pleanty of free time during day for golf, tennis, fishing,, whatever the hell you want. Whining,, privelaged, rarely worked summer jobs high school or college, tattoos , ball bearings,,, nose rings,,,,, etc. If you can sell you can make a damn good living selling home improvements and there are good companies out there.
See it used to be people were willing to be paid a fair wage for a hard days work. WORK, that four letter word that means committment. That four letter word that involves generating something of value for whomever signs your paycheck. Our nation is broken. It is a moral condition. I see 8 year olds with cell phones, stranger danger dont ya know. We give trophies for showing up. In the business world go ahead and claim your lack of performance is because all the leads suck. Go start your own business then.
Accountability? WTF is that? I got to stop before I blow a gasket. I read recently that more than 20 thousand factories have closed in America since the year 2000. It is not the millenials. It is not the baby boomers. It is not the greatest generation. It is all of us. WE have allowed it, self included. How do we fix it? That is the million dollar question. That is the question my friends that will decide what the next generation and those beyond will be living like.
I used to think it is fixable. Then I look around. Eyes wide open. Honest perspective from the Windy City? House speaker Denny Hastert has just been indicted for paying over a million dollars in hush money to a life long friend. My guess is it will shake out having something to do with real estate speculation for the 3rd Chicago airport yet to be built.
The corruption goes from city, township, county, state all the way up to the Federales. Can we take it back? Want to run for school board or city council. i will in my spare time when I quit working 6 day weeks. Until then, keep one eye on your bobber. Sorry for the rant.
coach H was diddling the wrestler boys.
Jobs have been leaving the U.S. For years. Companies wanting low wage workers and few environmental regs. NAFTA and now TPP. Job losing deals for Americans.