<p>I think this is what most of us parents are worried about, that our college graduates won't be able to find a decent job.</p>
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...For young adults, the prospects in the workplace, even for the college-educated, have rarely been so bleak. Apart from the 14 percent who are unemployed and seeking work, as Scott Nicholson is, 23 percent are not even seeking a job, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total, 37 percent, is the highest in more than three decades and a rate reminiscent of the 1930s.</p>
<p>The college-educated among these young adults are better off. But nearly 17 percent are either unemployed or not seeking work, a record level (although some are in graduate school). The unemployment rate for college-educated young adults, 5.5 percent, is nearly double what it was on the eve of the Great Recession, in 2007, and the highest level by almost two percentage points since the bureau started to keep records in 1994 for those with at least four years of college.
[/quote]
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<p>I don't recall seeing what the young man in question majored in. The article says his brother was a poli sci major.</p>
<p>Seems to me as if this could have been written for those of us who graduated in the late 1970’s (especially those of us in the Midwest). Of course,my friends and I were willing to work a few “dead end jobs”.<br>
I also recall seeing a lot of “gloom and doom” articles in the early '90’s with Gen X’rs complaining that the baby boomers had all of the good jobs and that they were left with nothing.
This is why I refuse to get worked up over this.</p>
<p>If you don’t, all those writers who get paid the big bucks to produce the newest, “This youth of today are doomed!!!” article every frickin’ week.</p>
<p>Are you sure you want to cause even more unemployment? Can you live with that on your conscience?</p>
<p>Because I can; just want to make sure you’re up to it!</p>
<p>That to me speaks volumes about a whiny entitlement attitude. I agree with FallGirl that this tough employment market mirrors “our generation” leaving undergrad in the mid-late seventies, those that couldn’t stomach sending out hundreds of resumes flooded MBA programs and law schools which churned doom and gloom about locating those types of jobs and so on and so on and I sure can’t get worked up about kids that turn up their noses at $40,000 starting pay. The young man in the article is lucky I’m not his mother (or father) or his rear would have been bounce kicked out the door and his clothes on the street the minute he turned that job down.</p>
<p>This is a pattern with the New York Times. They will focus on some problem attendant on being upper-middle-class, but choose a terrible example to make their point. I remember an article about students who could not get summer jobs. The examples included kids who did not get internships and had decided that they were too good to cut grass or bus tables, so they were sitting at home doing nothing. Quite similar to this young man, who feels he is too good to accept a 40K white-collar job. To quote that great poet and thinker Johnny Rotten, “You’ve got a problem/ the problem is you.”</p>
<p>A ridiculous article about a seriously confused kid. I mean, sure, you’ve got a perfect right to refuse the $40K job if you want to hold out for the dream job, but then for Pete’s sake don’t whine and complain about your situation. You’re one of the lucky ones who gets to pick and choose. I know well-educated adults, parents of children, who have been very happy to find $40K “dead end” jobs recently.</p>
<p>And that caption on the first page of the NYT article saying the kid “has not been able to find a job” is just an outright falsehood. They ought to publish an erratum.</p>
<p>“… for those of us who graduated in the late 1970’s …”</p>
<p>The late '70’s recession turned out to be a blessing for me, though it didn’t seem like it at the time. Several hundred resumes generated one interview … to monitor chemical balance at a cesspool in Texas. I was turned down for the job … presumably for showing insufficient enthusiasm! Back home I got two offers (at minimal salary) outside my field. I chose the more appealing one, and the rest as they say, is another American Success Story.</p>
<p>That’s typical NYT fare, actually. They take a story about one affluent WASPy teenager, show him going through an extremely mild, totally self-inflicted hardship, and then extrapolate that into some kind of national crisis. Not only is this guy not representative of most Americans (who are not upper middle-class WASPs), he’s not even representative of most upper middle-class people! I can’t imagine what the target demographic for this article was. Narcissistic teenagers? Sheltered airheads?</p>
<p>“Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.”</p>
<p>I stopped reading the article at that point. I’m not interested in how the crisis is affecting fools.</p>
<p>Fool is right - he could take the $40,000/year job and work his butt off and move up - more slowly that he planned - but still. He could take the $40,000/year job and then look for something higher after a year or two. He majored in political science and minored in history - he only has an undergraduate degree - what is this guy expecting? I blame his parents. They are making life too easy for him. He has no debts - no student loans - just expectations and entitlement.</p>
<p>I’m a career counselor as well as an admissions counselor. One of the fundamental laws of this business is that it’s easier to get a job when you have a job. The longer he stretches this two-year hole in his resume, the harder it will be for him to get the kind of job he thinks he wants.</p>
<p>Never mind the fact that conducting a job search from a laptop is a great way to get nowhere. He needs to be out in the community, meeting people. He’s more likely to hear about a real job opening while doing volunteer work than he is while messing around on monster.com.</p>
<p>Never mind the fact that now his misguided, entitled fool self is officially enshrined online forever in the NYTimes! I sure wouldn’t hire him after I found this.</p>
I particularly loved the melodramatic photograph of the kid hunched over his laptop at his parents’ table, wreathed in shadow, while in the distance the sunlight plays merrily on his family’s multi-acre backyard. Happiness so close–yet so far! </p>
<p>I couldn’t read the whole thing, either. But I did get far enough to read about the dad and grandfather’s dismay about Scott turning down the $40K job. </p>
<p>The kid should be embarrassed for earning his 15 minutes of fame this way.</p>
<p>… teachers make way more than $40,000 a year. Especially factoring in their little unions and ridiculous state benefits.</p>
<p>You people dont understand that members of the upper middle class would rather die than fall down to the middle class. The shame and the pitying from your other upper middle class friends would be unbearable. 40,000$ a year for a college grad? Thats ridiculous. The average for a college grad is around 60k. I know i’d rather die than become poor. Go rich or go dead.</p>