<p>I agree with SB’s pov about living with your parents vs being dependent on your parents. </p>
<p>I’ve been more or less independent of my parents since I was in high school. I have also been working since I was 15ish. </p>
<p>If I go to grad school at U of M, I will most likely be a boomerang kid because my parents live very close to U of M. </p>
<p>But I signed my apartment lease through August (I graduate in May) as a way to make sure I’ll never have to go back and live at my parents’ home. It’s amazing to me how many seniors I know aren’t even remotely interested in looking at jobs or grad school and just PLAN on going back home to mom and dad. Those parents should NOT accept those students back. However, I know that the job market is extremely tough. If you’re actively looking for jobs/school then that’s a completely different story. </p>
<p>I love my parents and we have a very equal relationship with one another. I’m my father’s best friend (no, really) and I will always have a place to go if things get rough. However, I think I owe it to them to NOT make them plan A.</p>
<p>Agree that it is at least partly cultural. H (before we met & later married) lived with his folks for many years before buying a place of his own. He lived in his own place for about 5 years, but his folks still often begged him to come to visit & have dinner with them, as well as do their finances. He finally moved back with them, as it was more convenient all the way around & rented out his place instead. He lived with them until we met and married. I never thought less of him because he lived with his folks, often ate with them & helped them with their finances.</p>
<p>If our kids move back to HI, it is likely that at least for some time, they will end up living with us, as many homes in our area are $500,000 and up! We enjoyed the time our S lived with us after he had been hired but before his job started. He was with us from August until about March – helped us declutter and helped grandparents declutter. He was a joy to become reacquainted with!</p>
<p>My nieces have moved back with my S & BIL when they came back to HI. The older one moved out only after she got married. The other one still lives with S & BIL. They all seem content with the arrangement.</p>
<p>I do not understand this. Among the seniors I have known, figuring out “what’s next” was the main focus of their last year in college (except for a few who were returning as full-time employees to a company where they had interned over the summer). Graduate school applications, job hunting, or both (for those who were hedging their bets) were a huge focus of their lives. And in general, the effort paid off. They all ended up starting a reasonably appropriate job/internship/graduate program within a few months after graduation.</p>
<p>Talked to my graduating senior yesterday about her plans, she wants to go to Grad school but it was suggested that she take a year or two off to work before she went back. Said she has no desire to come back and live with us (love ya, but…) and although she is applying to jobs she is also considering getting an unpaid internship in her field (good for Grad School connections) and bartending to support herself, hmmmmm guess she will be getting a lot of roommates but good for her, she seems determined to do so.</p>
<p>She would be welcomed home to work and save money if she needed but the key would be to work!</p>
<p>I kind of have to agree with amtc. I’ve lived with various roommates, took jobs with small spaces that covered housing, etc. But many of my peers nowadays refuse to get a roommate, and they refuse to live in the low-cost areas of the city (I currently live in NYC). I once suggested Queens to a friend who’s looking for a place to live, which is a cheaper borough with nice-sized apartments, and she made a face. She couldn’t articulate what was wrong with Queens, just that she didn’t want to live there (and I didn’t suggest a high-crime area). I have another friend who is paying $1500 a month and commuting 1.5 hours to school from Brooklyn simply because she couldn’t bear to live with someone else. Another person who is apartment-hunting, I told there were nice, good-sized apartments in Inwood - which is a beautiful residential neighborhood with lots of parks and a university - and she complained that it was “too far from Midtown.” It takes 40 minutes on the express train to get to Midtown from Inwood! Most people in NYC commute farther than that.</p>
<p>I mean, affordability is definitely an issue. Especially in my city, even finding an affordable 2-bedroom apartment in a relatively nice neighborhood is difficult, especially if you want to live in Manhattan below 125th St. But in my experience, my peers also have such high expectations about what they’re going to be able to get right out of college. While I wouldn’t want to share a room with anybody, I think it’d be cool and fun to get a 4-bedroom apartment and share it with three other young professionals. And that’s an affordable option and would drive down costs a lot - even sharing among 3 people. I had another friend who moved into an apartment with 3 other people for grad school and I think his rent was in the $500-600 range.</p>
<p>I showed another friend who’s graduating with her MA soon and is currently job hunting a job ad in New York that pays $54K. She turned up her nose. But she’s got far larger loans than I do - NYU undergrad to Columbia MA! I’d take that job because you never know where that job will lead you - it was with the New York City Department of Health and we’re both in public health/health education. Besides, I think $54K is a great starting salary - but then again, I was raised in a family of 5 that was sustained on one income of about $60K.</p>
<p>Around here, people typically are able to get apartments alone on a pretty low salary, it’s not very expensive-- but if need be they get a place with friends. As someone who couldn’t afford the single apartments but didn’t have friends in the area anymore to room with, I admit I was reluctant to jump on craigslist to find strangers on the internet to share a bedroom with. I’d have done it, though, if it would have helped. It was just a foreign concept, and it had nothing to do with not wanting to share space.</p>
<p>I think the group of new grads with student loan payments as high as mine are in the minority, but in my case in order to make it work with no wiggle room in my budget at all for emergencies or savings, I’d probably need 3-4 roommates to split a SMALL 1-br, and I’m not even sure if you’d be allowed to put that many people into an apartment the size I am thinking. Roommates don’t bring down loans, car insurance, gasoline-- a BIGGIE when there’s no public transport available, medical insurance, etc and those are enough to pretty much wipe out my whole paycheck. Before you rush to assume your boomerang neighbor kid is just too entitled to live with roommates, you should consider the fact that a roommate isn’t the cure-all for some new grad’s financial issues. A lot of humanities majors and similar probably make even less than I do and those loan payments pack a pretty strong punch.</p>
<p>I say this because I have had quite a few people look at me in disgust and say “well you could always get roommates if you really cared” and it’s /really/ irritating. Sort of like how going to community college before transferring to a 4 year supposedly fixes all financial aid woes.</p>
<p>What is wrong with working kids being at home? I can honestly say that my major motivator for not returning home was feeling as though my parents would be angry, not a desire to have my own nest. Low rent neighborhoods and strange roommates that you find on Craig’s list are not always safe options. Sometimes you don’t know there is a creepy person in your midst until after you are living with them. I did not find post-graduate shared housing to be a necessary or worthwhile lesson in life. It was risky at best.</p>
<p>I’d been married for three years and was 31 before we had a place all to ourselves, but except for the summer immediately following graduation I haven’t spent any significant amount of time with my parents since I was 16. My oldest had a job offer by fall of his senior year and is on the other side of the country in his own apartment. Some of his high school friends seem to be mooching off parents and barely looking for work. The parents seem to simultaneously ringing their hands and enabling the behavior from what I can see.</p>
<p>Our oldest graduated last June and moved back home at the end of July. She is still in school, getting her teaching credential and her Master’s. The credential program requires that she student teaches 5 days a week (no pay) and attends class 2 nights a week. They recommend students NOT work during this program, if at all possible. She is usually up late grading papers, writing lesson plans etc. The only time she could possibly work is on the weekends, which would not be enough to pay rent. It actually has worked out very well. She had 2 surgeries on her foot in Aug., and would not have been able to make it up the stairs to her apartment if she had stayed there. We were able to help her through the recovery time and the 12 weeks on crutches. She’s a good “housemate” and we enjoy her company. DH has said, however, that once she has her credential, she is on her own. If she finds a teaching job, great. If not, she needs to find something to pay rent and some roommates if necessary!</p>
<p>S1 graduates in June and will be heading off to see his fiancee overseas for a couple of months. They plan to come back here for about a month to “stage” their long-distance move. S never planned on coming back here to stay, and we have been pretty upfront with the expectation that one gets a job and becomes independent. Of course, it helps that S1 has marketable job skills.</p>
<p>I may get to eat my words with S2. We live in an area where jobs that fit him are available, though very tough to get. The cost of living is pretty prohibitive. He is determined to have roommates and be on his own, but we’ll see how it shakes out.</p>
<p>The idea that you need some time off after graduating from college is absolutely silly. All that time in school was not at all like having a job. Adults need to work in order to survive and anyone that is allowing their adult child to lounge at home is not doing them any favors.</p>
<p>It can be really hard to get a job after graduating. That is true and is an understandable part of life. It is however important for an adult to get a job after graduating, any job. While the job that you were looking for, that goes along with the education that you spent so much time on, might not be immediately apparent, there are other choices until it comes along.</p>
<p>Adult children should contribute to the household. They should be doing a share of the upkeep on the house, besides taking care of their own mess, and should be contributing something financially as well. If the parents don’t want to take their money then they should have them put something into savings while they stay at home.</p>
<p>Allowing kids to come home for a while is a good idea but allowing them to stay there for months on end without doing anything to move toward a more secure future is not smart for anyone involved.,</p>
<p>Ironically, it can be easier to get one if you do your job-hunting before you graduate – in some fields, starting as early as the beginning of senior year. It’s unfortunate that more students don’t take advantage of their colleges’ on-campus recruiting opportunities.</p>
<p>It might depend on your major. Computer Science majors typically have
brutal programming labs that can take up quite a bit of time to get
working. In many cases, that is like the real world where you work a
lot of hours during certain parts of the schedule and then relax in
the lighter parts of the schedule.</p>
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<p>Nothing wrong with a mental and physical break from grueling amounts
of work.</p>
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<p>Official numbers are 6 million unemployed with probably another 6
million underemployed or discouraged. It may be important but it may
still be very difficult to get a job in the current environment.</p>
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<p>The unemployment rate in 2011 for new grads with engineering degrees
was around 7+%. I imagine that a lot of these folks used their career
centers - but sometimes it is just plain hard out there.</p>
<p>We hired an MIT grad several years ago and asked him when he wanted to start. He said August or September - he wanted to take a break and find an apartment and settle in. That was fine.</p>
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<p>There’s grad school too.</p>
<p>And it is easier finding your first job when the job market is improving rather than beating your head against a wall.</p>
<p>^^ Most entry level jobs do not need someone with a grad degree, especially those without real job experience.
I’ve done a lot of hiring and I always ask the applicants why they went to grad school. There’s a lot of on the job training sometimes an advanced degree will hurt them if they expect to be paid more. A lot of times the abilities of one having an Masters or a Bachelors are the same.
I really doubt an MIT grad will rest a year at home because he was too exhausted after done college work. A month or two yes.</p>