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

all my experience tbh.

I read various online articles about how to get a job, and a common theme from top $$$ guys is 'Hah - you may have a degree, young sir, but I want to see a proven track record of hands on mettle. Impress me. Wear a red tie. Don't wear a red tie. You've got to stand out. You've got to prove you can fit in. Why don't you have a youtube video explaining why I should hire you? Delete your facebook account', etc, etc.

If that's an accurate representation of what people are looking for when they hire, then it explains a lot, but again, dunno if these guys are just blustering, and I'm latching on to that as an excuse to be lazy.

I do think independent study classes are treated as a privilege here, given only to high-achieving students who have already proven themselves--afaict they're almost unheard of in undergrad? Much more common in post-grad. If having to go to class and listen to lectures and be tested or turn in work periodically on the reading is what you're calling "hand-holding" then yeah, I guess.

Profs usually down-grade for missing class and generally treat it like high school, basically. They just throw material at you faster and the class sizes are larger (for low-level lecture courses).

Looking for work is destroying my mind and sense of self-worth :(

do i dare go BACK to college???

I'm thinking about going back to university, as well.

The income-based repayments are specific programs and don't apply to most loans.

Is this true? Your loans have to be under the government, which means you'd need to consolidate private loans (if you are able to ) in order to qualify for IBR.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101012270

The largest bank in the United States will stop making student loans in a few weeks.

JPMorgan Chase has sent a memorandum to colleges notifying them that the bank will stop making new student loans in October, according to Reuters.
The official reason is quite bland.
"We just don't see this as a market that we can significantly grow," Thasunda Duckett tells Reuters. Duckett is the chief executive for auto and student loans at Chase, which means she's basically delivering the news that a large part of her business is getting closed down.

The move is eerily reminiscent of the subprime shutdown that happened in 2007. Each time a bank shuttered its subprime unit, the news was presented in much the same way that JPMorgan is spinning the end of its student lending.

"It's no longer sustainable and not the right place to allocate capital in the future," HSBC Holdings Group Chief Executive Michael Geoghegan said in a statement the day HSBC shut down its subprime unit in 2007.

"Lehman Brothers announced today that market conditions have necessitated a substantial reduction in its resources and capacity in the subprime space," the press release issued in August 2007 said.

Is there a way of finding out what % of student loans taken out come from JPMorgan currently? If it's even something like 5%, and no-one else is interested in filling the gap, that's a lot of people not being able to go to college, right?

As I recall, private lending has just basically been forced out by the fact that government loans are better and more popular. Don't know of any cases where students are forced into private loans b/c they can't get govt ones?

Ah okay, wasn't sure how the US system worked

Feel like this belongs here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-23972952

A university graduate says he was left humiliated after being asked to dance to a Daft Punk song during a job interview at an electronics superstore.

Alan Bacon, 21, thought working at Currys in Cardiff would be ideal given his love of cameras, and he spent a week preparing for the interview.

But instead of showcasing his skills, he ended up doing robotic-style dancing "like a scene out of [BBC TV comedy] The Office".

Currys has since apologised.

It has also admitted that the dance segment of the interview had been a mistake and was not part of its official recruitment processes.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote

I ended up dancing to Around the World by Daft Punk, doing rubbish robotics in my suit in front of a group of strangers”

Alan Bacon
Mr Bacon has been looking for work since gaining his degree in documentary, film and TV from the University of South Wales in July.

He said he was finding the process "extremely hard" because so many people were job hunting.

After finding out he had an interview for a sales assistant role at Currys Megastore in Newport Road, he was told he would have five minutes to talk to interviewers about his hobbies.

So, armed with photographs to highlight his love of astronomy, he went to the group interview on Tuesday.

But he said he was left "incredulous" as the group was told it was being split into two, with each having to make up a dance.

The bulk of full-time students entered through the UCAS system with A-levels or equivalent qualifications and many of the University's degree courses are selective in that they require specific A-levels or above average grades for entry.[citation needed]

The University of South Wales is recognised as one of Wales’s five major research universities and a leader in key areas of specialist research,[citation needed] such as sustainable energy, educational development, creative industries and the arts, mobile communications, humanities, sports injury and performance, new business incubation, and innovation for technology and start-up companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUe_Pi8NfT4

Bacon haha amirite guys

As I recall, private lending has just basically been forced out by the fact that government loans are better and more popular. Don't know of any cases where students are forced into private loans b/c they can't get govt ones?

― "Dave Barlow" is the name Lou uses on sabermetrics baseball sites (s.clover), Friday, 6 September 2013 23:11 (Yesterday) Permalink

My understanding was that the private loans were less about "not being able to get" govt ones then about filling the gaps, i.e. amounts over and above the govt loan program limits. Which I think you would almost certainly need if you were going to finance 100% of the cost of an expensive private college. But maybe they've increased the govt loan limits, IDK.

there are also PLUS loans for that, although the terms don't seem spectacular?

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/death-of-an-adjunct-703773/

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/fashion/Millenials-Millennials-Generation-Y.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

“I feel like their work ethic is a legitimate concern, even though it sounds like you’re a whiny old person complaining about the youth,” said Jared Neumark, 31, who produced the video for Official Comedy. “There’s this focus on enjoying your work, and that creates a huge problem because there needs to be a part of the population that has not-so-much-fun jobs, more labor-intensive jobs, or that are, like, lawyers.”

Jared Neumark is a millennial so I don't understand who "they" are that he's talking about.

are Millennials and Gen Y the same? I thought they were 2 different generations -- like Gen Y were born between 1976 and 1990, and the Millennials are the generation after?

Gen X = born between early 60s and early 80s
Gen Y / Millenials = born between early 80s and early 2000s

Gen Y == Millennial

neumark is probably distancing himself a bit by looking back at younger people and associating himself with the olds

which i think probably has to do with where you locate your adulthood relative to your supposed cohort; by snoball's counting i am gen x, but at the tail end, and i was reading about gen xers in their 30s when i was a teenager and not quite recognizing myself in them, except vicariously through slacker alt-culture etc. (they had a different relationship to the culture of their parents, whereas for me 'the 60s' was strictly history-book?, not even family / older-gen lore?) then when i was exiting college ca. 2k talk of 'millennials' picked up and seemed to peg them more as people only just then reaching adulthood (18 in 2k = enlistable, not quite yet drinking-legal).

Gen X = born between early 60s and early 80s
Gen Y / Millenials = born between early 80s and early 2000s

― that's you, that is (snoball), Saturday, December 21, 2013 6:27 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Back when Gen X was more of a buzzword, it was generally agreed that I was not a Gen X'er based on my '79 birth

these articles can suck my left nut, to put it as politely as i can

“I feel like their work ethic is a legitimate concern, even though it sounds like you’re a whiny old person complaining about the youth,”

self awareness A++++

feel like the """"millennial"""" work ethic is totally reasonable given the widely-publicized failure of hard work to get anyone anywhere in 21st c. america

are any sociologists who talk about generations starting to talk about increasing the rate of 'new generations' for recent kids? technology and society have moved so rapidly that a kid born in 2014 isn't going to share all that many experiences with one born in 2004 much less 1994

This whole idea of slicing up history into 'generations' is bull anyway. It only sort-of works with periods of social/political upheaval, like WW2 or the 1960s.

Mr. MacKenzie of Magid Generational Strategies has already helped coin a term for those born after the millennials: “plurals,” who he said will be “more pragmatic” and “much more individually focused on their own success.”

Think millennials are narcissistic? Just you wait.

ok who wants to start the Plurals thread??

Let some smartass kid do it i couldnt be fucked my dad he started threads fifty years man and boy still ended up in the cold ground of milwaukee with a pauper's gravestone me ill have none of it all i need in the world is a yard of brushed plaid, my 1500 dollar whalebone precision shave kit and this here latte

lol

The torch is pased it's yours to return
Lay at their feet now use it to burn
For marketing the use of the word generation
A false alliance of money persuading
Forcing silence sound sucking
Forced into this conversation
Now if you want to sieze the sound you don't need a reservation
So open so young so target I can smell your heart you're a target

This whole idea of slicing up history into 'generations' is bull anyway. It only sort-of works with periods of social/political upheaval, like WW2 or the 1960s.

like coming of age w/ the existence of the internet, being young / a young adult during 9/11, iraq + afghanistan, entering the job market during the great recession (or in its aftermath) - i think more than many generations millennials have experienced shared social/political upheaval.

But that upheaval was also experienced by everyone else, not just people in a certain age range. Which is also why I said 'only sort-of works' above, because although the effects of WW2 and the 1960s could be said to have affected each person in a particular age group in a broadly similar way, the closer an individual's experience is examined the more unique they are, even compared to other apparently very similar peers. What I'm laboriously trying to say is that the idea of 'generations' in a sociopolitical sense only begins to work if you're looking at people in such a broad view that practically all detail is lost. Which makes such a view pretty much meaningless.

as a falsifiable model it fails but generations are an interesting way to talk about evolving/shifting attitudes on a more macro scale. why do particular beliefs + ethics shift over time? we def see dramatic shifts in this things when we interview different age cohorts. younger ppl have more liberal views on a variety of social issues (gay marriage, marijuana legalization) and maybe the generational construct lets us talk about some of those things. i agree tho that saying any generation is 'hard working' or 'entitled' or whatever is just silly. but it's not silly to note that american millennials will be one of the rare generations to earn less money than their parents.

well that's why there are demographers

don't think sociologists treat "generations" in the solid, sequential sense being derided here.

Here is a characteristic generational/"of our times" thing that I think is striking -- my salary at age 30 was less than my dad's at 30, yet more than he makes now.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/09/at_berkeley_krugmans_warning_becomes_reality/

on a new documentary about the privatization of u.c. berkeley

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-02/the-scandal-bowl-tar-heels-football-academic-fraud-and-implicit-racism

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20140210.png

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/10/from_harvard_to_webcam_girl/

is there a religion i could join that would be deeply against this not for any perversion-related reasons, but because the post-post-post-whatever economy that drives it is destroying the fabric of society in which people can just get together and be perverted

All I see in that post is a petulant rich girl who is so mad that she didn't immediately get an awesome job that she decided to take her clothes off.

didn't get that at all

i can't help but relate to the life of a soul-crushing office drone. good for her *shrug*

I had recently earned my master’s degree from Harvard and had accepted a coveted yet thankless entry-level position at a well-known philanthropic organization in New York City.

A thankless entry-level job! They didn't tell me it was going to be like this!