generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

Teaching one course this semester, on the other hand, leads me to a second occupation posting to message boards.

The esquire article is ok but I'm very politically suspicious of the anti-boomer narrative circulating right now (even though that article at least hedges on whether it's actually their fault).

why are you suspicious?

it all interlocks a little too conveniently with the conservative agenda (the 60s represent moral bankruptcy, too much freedom is bad, "entitlement spending" is the cause of all our problems, etc.)

huh?

it also conveniently absolves things like trade policy and financial deregulation of any contribution they've made to our economic decline

"boomer" is practically code for "big government liberal"

waht

Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama's 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.

Yeah, half of that piece seems to be attacking Republican tax cuts.

Our classes have swollen to such an extent that my university is experimenting with what it calls "graders": adjuncts who do the work of TA's but aren't considered such because they have experience dealing with student complaints and subbing for the prof. I'm done it for two years. On the one hand it's real easy money: adjunct pay without worrying about going to class every day (you show up when it's time to collect an essay or grade blog posts); on the other, I worry that this is the future of adjuncting: don't give an adjunct a full class but keep him as an appendage.

wait, so these aren't just students doing it?

lots of full-time students get a stipend for grading, but I've never heard of paying non-students to do this; weird

The argument is: experienced adjuncts don't need supervision from the "primary instructor" and can handle students. I don't get a grade or evaluated for my performance either.

I have two classes like this now but thankfully I've got a third that's 100% my own.

I've read about some schools outsourcing grading to India!

(Also, I am reminded again of the benefits of working in Saskatchewan.)

But you're giving the full stipend of an adjunct?

"given"

It's not a stipend -- it's a salary.

Grad student TAs get stipends.

"boomer" is practically code for "big government liberal"

this is really the only popular thing ive seen really explicitly making the case about generational conflict and thats... not at all the way i read the piece

OK, cool. "Adjunct" still = contract instructor hired on a per-course basis, right? What I would call a "sessional"?

xpost to Alfred

like idk if this is a 'thing' that your reacting to in general or what but that seems like a wildly off reaction to the point this article is making

lol marking is like the only part of my TA duties that i enjoy, i wish i could get money for only doing that

this is really the only popular thing ive seen really explicitly making the case about generational conflict and thats... not at all the way i read the piece

At least up here, older voters vote way further to the right than young voters (and unfortunately, also vote in far greater numbers).

xpost to Lamp: seriously? I fucking hate marking with all my heart. It's the only part of teaching that I hate.

OK, cool. "Adjunct" still = contract instructor hired on a per-course basis, right? What I would call a "sessional"?

exactly! It still sucks because we're dependent on (a) available funds (b) enrollment. I'm lucky that I have a real university full time job. I've got friends who drive 30 miles daily from campus to campus to teach.

I would say if I do have a critique of the boomer narrative it's that I think that a lot of the big processes began w/ the generation before them. boomers were still pretty young when reagan came to power.

http://chronicle.com/article/Should-Working-Class-People/131283/

Briallen Hopper is a lecturer in the English department at Yale University and blogs for the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/briallen-hopper. Johanna Hopper works full time at a bakery and blogs at joeylth.blogspot.com.

all roads lead to blogging

lol

didn't realize this has already been posted on grad school thread

Still fixating on that Post article, even the advisor at the Centre for Teaching and Learning here estimates that for a new course, you need 3-5h of prep time for every hour of lecture time, which is consistent with my experience. So I want to know why the author is so sure it's unlikely that someone would spend 1h prepping AND marking for every hour of lecture time. Are they just assuming that tenured faculty are teaching stuff they've taught many times before? In that case, I could maybe see where they're coming from.

yeah I think it was a critique of long-term tenured faculty

no it was a critique of tenured faculty at TEACHING universities, huge distinction

Those faculty members still need to publish though, right? Or are there bachelor's degree-granting institutions where there are tenured faculty positions that strictly involve teaching, like the European 'lecturer' position?

At the last place where I taught, one of the reasons the union went on strike was that the uni was trying to bring in positions like that.

no, faculty at teaching institutions (in the USA) needn't publish to get tenure or even to get promoted to full. zero pubs will get you full.

That's the case e.g. at most every regional state uni, like the Cal States or your "Western X"s

Well, reappointment and promotion at my UG institution (a SLAC) was contingent on faculty's performance in teaching, scholarship/art, and service to the institution.

I think it's just an article by a guy who has no idea how much work college faculty do even at non-R1-type institutions, and thus just cranky.

Cal State tt faculty teach 3-3-3 loads fwiw (on quarters)

So I guess there's a difference depending on what kind of teaching-oriented position you're in. selfxp

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/esquire-magazine-writer-wanted-to-help-convert-class-war-into-generational-war-no-skills-required-pays-top-dollar

kind of lol but mostly sad

dean baker's a cool dude and there def is some hyperbole in the original piece which was very obviously not written by an economist - but the 'coup of the 1%' didn't just happen while nobody was looking - the reagan/dubya tax cuts and a large % of the piece by piece policy shifts - were sold by appealing to self-interest. boomers have been a demographic plurality during this period - as I mentioned upthread the generation before them prob doesn't get enough credit for starting a lot of these waves. but the 'americans don't deserve any responsibility because the plutocracy runs things' narrative is also misleading.

the original author does confuse wealth and income, but baker's going for hyperbole himself when he uses a harvard mba w/ $150,000 in debt as a counterexample. maybe a tiny bit not representative of the median 20-something w/ debt? the underinvestment in public higher education / lack of concern about cost inflation wasn't a conspiracy by the 1%, it's something that people watched happen and helped happen because of a cultural shift that saw education as a personal-investment and not a public-investment.

basically baker's point is 'look at the boomers, they're not so well off either' - which is true, but its true for the same reason, which is that the country - primarily under the political and technical control of the boomers and the previous gen - stopped making long-term social investments and started focusing on short-term personal consumption. there was nothing secret about the coup of the 1%, it happened because people wanted bigger tvs, cars and houses more than they wanted equitable tax policies, universal health care / higher ed.

and 'people' isn't limited to boomers, but they were the demographic plurality during this period and were the technocrats in charge during the 90s/00s.

http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/03/the-generation-gap-and-the-2012-election-3/11-3-11-17/

this is interesting I think - the boomers who grew up under nixon (56 to 61 year olds) remained scarred by the experience and leaned dem over the years. it's the gen before them + (esp) the younger boomers and the older half of gen x who have been consistently right-wing. there's actually a substantial margin between 50-55 year olds and 56-61 year olds and it's all thanks to nixon.

but what that chart really says is 'let's blame 37 to 84 year olds'

a friend of mine wrote this on facebook in response to that riposte:

‎"The calculation the n subtracts liabilities: mortgage debt..."
...
"This means that if we add up the home equity of the typical household over age 65, their 401(k) and all other savings, the value of their car and any other possessions they might have, it comes to just over $170,000. This is a bit more than the price of the median home.

In other words, if the typical household over age 65 took all of their wealth, they would have enough money to pay off their mortgage. "

The article notes that 65+ has wealth over 170k, but rather deceptively frames it like that would barely cover their debts, which is not true at all. On average, they have that much in assets left over after all debts are accounted for. The article is being blatantly dishonest with those statements.

But I digress, it's framing in such a way as to miss the entire point. Younger people generally depend more on wages, whereas older people generally get more income from investments, pensions and social security--- the tax structure is heavily in favor of the people getting money from the latter. Not counted among the "assets" of the elderly are the value of Medicare, Rx drug benefits and Social Security. The article is also wrong in saying that they "paid" for any of these benefits with the possible exception of Social Security.

Esquire is right on pointing out the disparity between how much we spend on Medicare and on health programs for youth, especially when (a cursory glance at a US population pyramid suggests) the 0-18 population is radically larger than the Medicare eligible population, not to mention they are getting huge government benefits despite sitting on significant wealth.

The article is right in saying we shouldn't lose track of the fact that we are being royally screwed by the rich. And old people SHOULD have security and health care in their old age. And I think it's good to suspect that intergenerational conflict could be fostered to divert attention from legitimate class inequities. So when someone rightfully points out that the last generation had access to affordable education, now students have to get crippling loans and do internships, the appropriate response is not to stick it to the elderly, but to work on getting affordable education back. We wouldn't be agonizing about whether Medicare was unfair to young people if we had universal health care in this country, like a real civilization. Esquire could have also pointed out the astronomical growth in military spending, or the war on drugs. Etc. I'm rambling now

medicare is part of the reason we don't have universal health care in this country tho

OK, if people are getting tenure and associate prof salaries strictly for teaching 3 undergrad courses/semester that they've already taught before, their workload very well may be a little light.

yes

Clearly, I need to find one of those jobs.