Category Archives: millennials

Average is over

Posted on October 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

It’s Friday, so it must be Psychology Today time. A reporter called earlier in the week asking, What’s up with men today? Why are they so slow to get started on this path to adulthood? Is it internet porn? Bad parenting? She happened to be lying awake at night flummoxed as to why her son can’t seem to get it in gear at age 25. So today’s post over at Psych Today tries to answer that question (spoiler alert: it’s not internet porn). What is it like to get started in life today in an age of anxiety, when globalism and technology have fundamentally altered how we live and work, and yet our education remains stuck in an 18th century model of time clocks, standardized tests, and hierarchies.

It’s  inspired by a talk by Thomas Friedman I attended this week (at 7:15 in the morning no less) and an interview I did with Cathy Davidson on her new book, “Now You See It.”

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Posted in education, work and earnings

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“Unjust” is what lit the fire for Occupy Wall Street protesters

Posted on October 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

“The system is deeply unjust and careening out of control,” Naomi Klein, contributor at The Nation, told the protesters holding their ground at Occupy Wall Street in New York. That statement, it seems to me, holds the catalyst for this crowd-sourced protest. Besides having all the elements to rally a crowd, it turns on the word “unjust.” For this youngest generation, “unjust” is the equivalent of “Vietnam” for the Boomers. It’s loaded. It sparks the passion.

In many interviews with young people, their political apathy has always stood out. They don’t read newspapers. They don’t vote. They hate the horse-race politics. They don’t like confrontational debates. But where they are passionate is around causes, and in particular causes that rectify a wrong, that fight injustice. Usually that injustice has been elsewhere–Africa seems to be a favorite. AIDS, poverty, rape, dispossession: these are all topics young people have rallied around (mostly online). Our own two wars or poverty on our shores: not so much. The more abstract, far-away problems with clearly horrible consequences grabbed their attention. It was easy to “like” a cause online or buy a t-shirt or a pair of shoes that “gave back” to a cause.  Local political wrangling? Not interested. “I’m so bad at following politics and the news,” is a common response.

We recently sat down with about 100 young adults  for a wide-ranging interview on how the recession has affected them. (In a word: ouch.) As part of the interviews, we asked them about what they were thinking when they saw Lehman Brothers and the other big banks come crashing down in 2008, or the prospect that capitalism was being sorely tested. Most said something like, “Thank God it doesn’t affect me.” At the time, most were still in college, working on the assumption that it would be all said and done by the time they graduated. Now, two years later and largely unemployed or underemployed, they are perhaps thinking twice about where to cast the blame.

The big fuzzy social justice issues are suddenly becoming much more defined and personal. After all, this youngest generation is hardest hit by the recession. But in this case, social justice is their justice, not a cause in Africa or Tibet. It is the stark inequalities in wealth and assets and the power imbalance that such inequality brings. As Joseph Stiglitz put it, turning Lincoln’s famous phrase on its head: a government for the 1%, by the 1%, and of the 1%. (1% of the country’s population owns one-fourth of the nation’s income and 40% of its wealth today). Young adults are feeling this shift personally. The power imbalance is sucking the life out of their futures.

Sure, their demands are unformed, and the occupation on Wall Street is largely a 21st century love-in still. But they’re out there. For this generation, that’s huge. I cannot say that strongly enough: HUGE. This is a generation that talks the talk a lot about social issues, but doesn’t often walk the walk (either to the voting booth or the picket line). But here they are. Something has changed.

For once perhaps their ignorance of history will benefit them. They don’t feel the pressure to protest in familiar forms of the past. “Anarchy” doesn’t even fit them: not enough anger. They’re coming together on their own terms, in a new form of political protest. The skeptics don’t think this movement has a chance because they cannot articulate their demands. What do they want? But as my husband, who was at the rallies in the 1960s and 1970s said, it wasn’t that organized back then, either. A lot of people joined in for the hash and to pick up girls.

It is up to the legislators and others in power to respond to the protest. The protesters should not have to figure out how to fix the problem; that’s what we have elected officials for. The protesters’ role is to voice the discontent–no matter what that voice looks like. In that, they are doing their job as citizens.

For more on the protests, here’s an “official” site: Occupy Wall Street.
Here’s their newspaper (newspaper!): Occupied Wall Street Journal

Here’s the Facebook page.  Twitter is #occupywallstreet

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A new generation, a new movement underfoot

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Yesterday morning, after many mornings of disheartening news, I awoke  to the headline, “Protests Around the Globe as Faith in the Vote Wanes.” The story reported on young people in Israel, Spain, Greece, India, and elsewhere who have taken to the street to voice their anger at their leaders, at corruption, and at blocked opportunity. Yes, I thought. Start something. Start something now.

What was truly inspiring was the new form of government they are agitating for. With little faith in the ballot box, whose politicians are seen as corrupt and corrupted, pandering to the established interest groups, they are seeking a new answer. As the Times reports:

They are rejecting conventional structures like [political] parties or trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.

When we interviewed young people for Not Quite Adults, I distinctly remember Zach, a young 20-something with a bright future ahead. He and many others were electrified by Obama’s run at the time, and yet he said, politics as a whole turned him off. Asked about protests, he said,  ”My generation doesn’t go in for that old form of protest.”  The banner-waving, the bull horns, the fired-up masses: Too confrontational. Too radical.

Although his peers across the globe are still embracing the old-school protest, their ideas about how to govern, how to organize certainly reflect Josh’s ideas. Participatory, fresh, self-organizing, more decentralized and less dependent on a bullhorn or a figurehead leader. They are all leaders. “A beautiful anarchy” one Israeli called it.

The European and Israeli and Indians’ actions may have been sparked by traditional complaints: unemployment, lack of opportunity, corruption, an electorate who does not hear their pleas. But they are acting in new, and hopeful, ways. This younger generation is turning to each other, seeking a new way of governing. The old forms, in this generation’s eyes, are no longer legitimate–any of them. The Left is corrupt, the Right is corrupt–they all pander and work to hold on to power, nothing more.

Their decentralized self-organizing ethos springs from this generation’s life on the Web.  I have the good fortune to manage the online site for the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning program so I have the privilege of learning about digital media from people like Mark Surman from Mozilla Foundation and danah boyd at Microsoft, or Katie Salen of the Quest to Learn schools. I’ve seen first-hand how kids operate with digital media, and it is open, free, and most important to this conversation, the “sage on the stage” is dead.

The era of an “expert” deigned as such by a gatekeeper doling out credentials or admittance to the club is fading. And with this  fading comes come a diminishment of the powerful elite. Authority is turned on its head. If you’re good at what you do, and you’re only 15, so what? If you can pass muster among your peers and prove yourself in an open forum, who cares if you’re a 15, or 20, or 60?

Consider publishing. Since at least Boswell and Johnson’s era, authors were designated as such by the intellectual and power elite, whose judgments deigned one talented enough to join the club. Only a select few made the cut.  Unless one was accepted into that clatch, we were forever the reader, rarely the storyteller. That has now changed. Today we have at our fingertips the power to be the storyteller or reporter or columnist.  In 1999, there were 23 blogs on the internet. Today, there are more than 100 million, according to Technorati‘s “State of the Blogosphere” report. The voices of millions are broadcast out through the blogosphere, sometimes garnering only a handful or readers and at other times launching an unknown into the ranks of the blogging elite, with their ideas and opinions and stories reaching across the globe.

Our stories can find new audiences and be “published” in new forms. Consider Electric Literature, for example, where people from all over the world submit their short stories– written, video, or audio. Those stories are then geo-coded (tagged to the location where the story unfolds) and sorted by topic, such that walking to meet a date for brunch in Brooklyn on a Sunday morning, a person can download a love story whose plot unfolds right near the brownstone they are passing.

But the power doesn’t stop at authoring. In fact, as Surman told me one day, the real power lies in the ability to program and write code, which of course the open-source movement is all about making happen.  An art festival in Berlin held a “Facebook resistance” workshop where someone used a simple Firefox add-on (i.e., programming code) to change the ubiquitous “like” button on Facebook to “dislike.” He now has a different power relationship to a big monolith called Facebook. “It gives you choice,” Surman said.

The web lowers the barriers to participation and gives you the tools to direct your course.  Anyone can join an online discussion board and ask a question. More important, and more revolutionary, anyone can provide an answer.

“One thing is certain,” writes Will Richardson in 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn,  …”Instead of learning from others who have the credentials to ‘teach’ in this new networked world, we learn with others whom we seek (and who seek us) on our own and with whom we often share nothing more than a passion for knowing.”

The web makes this connection, this seeking possible, and our connections make “participatory” possible.  As Don Delillo imagined our world, “In the lonely pockets of towns and cities, a thousand minds tick.” Now those thousand minds are networked, and they tick even louder.

For the youngest generation, this participatory ethos is central. After all, the social web was largely built by young people, for young people.  Shawn Fanning and Napster; Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook; Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim and YouTube—they designed these sites and tools –in their early 20s

I’m a skeptic on most things (read the quote at the top), but I have to say, this movement inspires me. I hope it can take wing, not just in Europe or Syria or India, but here, too.

postscript: While I was writing this blog, a group called Splashlife sent me a link on twitter to the  ”take back Wall St.” movement going on right now. Check it out and join up. On twitter, you can follow it at #takewallstreet or #occupywallstreet.

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Young parents are losing ground

Posted on September 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

In a week of bad news for young adults, there’s more of it today. The share of young parents living in poverty shot up, and is at its highest peak in decades. That means that the children of those parents are also in poverty.  Today, more than one in three young parents (under age 30) lives in poverty. Thirty-seven percent! Not only is that a disgrace, but it is a threat to our futures.

We talked with many of these young people in Not Quite Adults, people like Sheila, a mother of three in her late 20s who babysits three kids in addition to caring for her own so she can balance work and family more easily. The pay is paltry–at the time less than $360 a month. She and her husband Tony had only a high school degree and were trying to patch together a living in the service sector. She’s worked in fast food, waitressing, data entry, she was a clerk at a dental clinic, and a nursing home aide. She cleaned houses for awhile, and tried to start her own business. The family lives hand to mouth, and her barely constrained desperation was evident in her interview.

Or there was Franco, a 27-year-old married father of two, who worked long days as a deliveryman for small grocery stores. Working 57 hours a week for about $12.50 an hour at the time, he was never home. Working those hours was the only way to raise his family’s income above the poverty line, but it was taking its toll.

There are countless other stories like these. We tend to imagine the latest generation as the kids we see on television or in the movies–elite brainiacs inventing the next social media tool or a slouching gamer hunkered down on the couch. But the vast majority are more like Sheila and Franco: working hard with little to show for it.

And these interviews were before the recession. It’s only worse now. I suspect that Franco and Sheila are struggling to hang on to their standard of living, and I would bet that they’ve been pushed out of their jobs as the competition for workers tightens. When estimates are that 17 million college grads are doing jobs that don’t require a BA, Franco and Sheila don’t stand a chance.

On top of the desperate job market, since 1996, the program that had supported single mothers and children (AFDC, now called TANF) has been radically altered. To receive cash assistance today, mothers must be working, and to prevent long-term dependency according to reformers, women can only receive TANF for a total of five years over their lifetime–cumulative. Every month receiving TANF counts against the clock, in other words.

After the reforms were passed, caseloads plummeted–which reformers pointed to as a sign that too many had been abusing the system. In 2010, there were 1.9 million families receiving TANF cash assistance, down from 4.8 million in 1995. However, as ample research shows, the caseloads plummeted mainly because the economy was hot. The late 1990s saw one of the most robust economies in recent memory. Jobs were plentiful, and young mothers were easily getting a foothold on the job escalator. States focused on job preparation on the belief that once in the door, they’d pick up the necessary skills to advance. But while many entered the workforce, many also embarked on a string of low-paying jobs, rarely moving up, like Sheila. As Ron Haskins, one of the main voices of welfare reform on the then-moderate Right, put it recently:

“There are a lot of moms who can’t make it under this kind of demanding regime. Most of them can get a job, but they cannot hold it. So they get a job; they lose their job; then they try to find another one; they lose that one. So they are in and out. Some of them just try it once and they are out. Research shows that these are usually moms who have two or more problems – problems such as depression (which is a big issue among welfare mothers); three or more kids (which raises issues about child care); problems with transportation; problems with housing. Most mothers can deal with one of those things and can keep going, but once they hit two or three (especially) there really is a drop-off.

Those strains were extended to other young mothers when the first serious economic downturn hit and many young mothers were let go. After a tough decade of the 2000s, according to LaDonna Pavetti, a leading researcher of welfare reform, the employment rate  among poorly educated single mothers on TANF is the same it was as reform took hold: 54%.  In the meantime, many young mothers have exhausted their benefits. You can see why unemployment insurance becomes so important today–keeping 3.2 million families out of poverty, according to the Urban Institute.

When we talk about the poverty rate of young families, we’re not only talking about single mothers of course. In fact, “working poverty” is a way of life for far too many.

There was a time when we were more committed to keeping people out of poverty.  During the 1960s and President Johnson’s “Great Society” programs (extending Bobby Kennedy’s War on Poverty),  the country agreed that the families should not have to go hungry in a land of plenty. Medicare and expanded Social Security are a direct result of that effort, and lifted millions of elderly out of poverty. Today, young families are now six times more likely to be poor than elderly families. The poverty rate for those over age 65 is 5.7%.

The programs of the Great Society also included the Peace Corps, VISTA, Head Start, the Higher Education Act, Jobs Corps, and other supports for young adults. They helped millions of young adults connect to work or find purpose in volunteering and giving back. Yes, some of those programs still exist today, and there are others that have been modeled on them, but gone is the commitment to taking care of each other as a society, for the betterment of the whole.

We are a fractured and poisonous politics today, a miserly and vindictive group (“I made it, why should I help anyone else?”). We are also short-sighted. No one can build a secure future without a strong foundation, and when so many young families are poor and struggling, we risk short-changing our future and the future of the next generation. Poverty has a long arm.

 

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Posted in marriage and relationships, parents, politics, poverty

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Young adults remain optimistic, but should they?

Posted on September 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’m being lazy today and directing you to my post at Psychology Today.
After interviewing nearly 100 young actuals ages 22-23, I’m still struck by how optimistic they are, despite the bleak outlook for jobs, the numbers living at home, and the general feeling of being stalled in life. A recent Atlantic article adds to this sense, with hundreds writing in, bewailing their current position. And yet… amid all this, many, if not most, think that in the end, they’ll do fine. While their generation overall may suffer, they’ll somehow be the exception. Is this a case of American individualism, always looking inward instead of outward for blame and solutions? Read on at Psychology Today…

 

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Posted in moving home, politics, work and earnings

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Young adults in poverty–short-changing the future

Posted on September 7, 2011 | 6 Comments

As we continue to struggle to create jobs and prosperity for Americans, I’m increasingly worried about the youngest generation. While they’re a resilient bunch, the long malaise of unemployment — and more likely underemployment–takes its toll. As recent college graduates join the queue in front of the job fairs and send their resumes out by the dozens into the seeming oblivion of human resource departments, their time out of the workforce tick-tocks against them. They may start out with a bit of optimism (remember the “funemployment” tweets of 20-somethings a few years ago), but that optimism quickly curdles. Disappointment becomes the new normal. They settle. They take jobs as bartenders and temps–anything to get them out of the house and doing something.

But as college grads take the jobs that don’t require a degree, they replace those who would normally work those jobs, and the ripple effect continues right down the line. This pressure starts above college grads, of course. It is older workers who are hanging on for dear life to jobs and the laid-off older workers desperate for any job — often jobs that newly minted graduates would take.

At the bottom of the pack is a grim reality: poverty or near poverty. Today’s poverty threshold for a single person in 2009 was $11,161. In 2009, 20.7% of young adults age 18-24 were in poverty. Nearly 15% of those age 25 to 34 were in poverty that year. The official poverty rate for all ages (0-85+) was 14.3% in 2009.

Here’s two charts that show poverty and near poverty (earning income at 150% of the poverty level) by age and gender in 2009.

Share of young adults living in or near poverty, 2009

Share of young adults in poverty, by gender, 2009

[ Source: U.S.Census Bureau, Annual Social Economic Supplement, "POV 34: Single Year of Age Poverty Status," 2009]

What these charts show is that the 20s are a vulnerable time. The poverty rates and near-poverty rates are higher than national averages throughout much of the 20s and early 30s, but particularly in the early years. (These data do not include kids in college dorms or military barracks.) The “all ages” bar on the far left is the national average for those ages 0-85+. You can compare the rates for young adults against that bar to see how they fare against the average U.S. poverty and near-poverty rates.

Age 25 seems to be an age when things start to get a little better. Poverty rates drop rather suddenly between age 24 and 25 and then stay lower throughout the rest of the 20s. That suggests that wages are beginning to grow with time on the job. Perhaps there’s been an advancement on the job, but more likely is that young people have changed jobs one or two times, with a pay bump each time.

However, with the recession holding everyone back, those job changes and pay bumps are not occurring, which likely means that the poverty rates will remain higher further into the 20s going forward. That’s worrisome. Living on $11,000 or $13,000 a year is no picnic. When apartments in major cities cost $700-800 for a one-bedroom (and higher in places like NYC), and with college loans adding a couple hundred dollars to that bottom line each month, not to mention food and utilities, it quickly becomes impossible to make ends meet. Living hand to mouth is a losing battle. Pretty soon, the beater of a  car breaks down, a tire goes flat, or an unexpected doctor’s bill adds to the pile. For those whose parents cannot help out, they can quickly sink.

The charts above also show how much more precarious life is for young women. The poverty rates for women are consistently and significantly higher than rates for men–despite women’s higher rates of college attainment. At age 25, fully one-fourth of women are in poverty. One-fourth! Why the higher rates? It’s complicated, but for starters, women are paid less in the workforce (averaging about 20 cents less on the dollar than men). They also must sometimes support children on their own. Early families are fragile families. They more often than not break up, leaving mom to care for the child.  Add to this trouble landing a job, any job, in today’s climate, and the picture is grim for many.

It all starts with a job. We must do better at creating family-sustaining jobs for all Americans. But for our future, we must turn our attention to the most vulnerable young adults and make sure they don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Poverty has a long reach. Its effects are felt in many ways, and they have a tendency to linger for years. The stress of living hand to mouth eats away at health and mental health. The conditions of poverty for children follow them into the classroom, make it difficult to focus and to pay attention. Their learning begins to lag behind their classmates. Living in low-income neighborhoods comes with its own set of dangers and strains, ranging from a lack of good grocery stores to serious violence and victimization. The long-term costs of NOT attending to poverty on a nation are paid in higher health care bills, greater imprisonment, less worker productivity, and a host of other social effects.

In this country, alleviating poverty begins with jobs. We must take that call seriously. We must demand compromise in this poisoned political environment because without us all at the table, nothing will get done and we will languish in the muck of “me-first” short-sighted politics when we need long-range solutions and above all, vision, if we are to ensure our future via the security of this current generation and the one right behind it.

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Can London Happen Here?

Posted on August 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

The riots in London have made people wonder whether something like that could happen here. After all, the recession is hitting young adults hard, making life look pretty hopeless  for many at this point. The unemployment rate of 16-19 year olds was 25% in July 2011. Among 20-24 year olds, it was 14.6%. That translates into only 45% of people ages 16 to 24 with a job of any kind – lower than at any point since World War II.

While college grads are struggling to get a foot in the door more than any time in recent memory, they aren’t the worst off. It is their peers with just a high school degree or a smattering of community college credits who are hurting bad. Their prospects in the job market have been withering for years, but the recession put the final nail in the coffin for far too many.

Earlier this summer in Chicago, we had a spate of flash mobs, where packs of teens and 20-somethings would roam the city looking for a victim. They’d swarm him (it was only men) and rob him, usually of his smart phone or ipad and some cash. They’d supposedly assemble via text messages, although that’s been debated. While not the burning, looting mobs of young people we saw in London, I suspect the spark that lit both groups was the same: frustration.

Locked out of the workforce, which increasingly requires training after high school, and often marked as “unemployable” because of their history or the color of their skin—a shocking 49% of young black men ages 16 to 19 are unemployed—- this group of high school dropouts (or even those with just a high school degree) is a tinder box. They’re idle, hanging out, bored, and increasingly see their future as going no where.  Nearly half of all 16-19 year old dropouts were neither in school nor working –and that was back in 2007. Overall, some put the number of disconnected youth at about 5 million in the mid-2000s. It is no doubt only higher today.  And the longer this recession lasts, the bigger this group of disconnected youth will grow as the disillusionment inches up the education ladder.  (While I have no idea if the flash mobs in Chicago were high school dropouts, my bet is that many were unemployed.)

Even if they do manage to land a job, their wages are low. After adjusting for inflation, the earnings of young men with no high school diploma as well as the earnings of those with just a high school degree dropped 23% between 1976 and 2006.

Lest you think this is a small problem, consider this. Our high school graduation rate is only about 75%. That’s upwards of 6 million people aged 16-24 who lack a high school degree. That number includes those who go on to get a GED. It’s about 3.5 million if you subtract those with a GED.

Some have little sympathy for those who drop out of high school, especially in this era when more jobs demand higher skills.  But we must care. This is our future. Can we really be so punitive toward a 17 year old? Remember how stupid you were when you were 17, and yet thought you knew it all? In this cold-hearted era of cuts to social programs while refusing to raise taxes on the wealthy, the likelihood of supports to get these kids back on track and into productive society is pretty slim. That’s the epitome of short-sightedness. We’ll pay in the long run, in sacrificed potential and more than likely, the human costs of imprisoning a generation. We can “crack down” on youth as they rage against the machine, as they have been doing in London, but it’s like trying to kill a dandelion by plucking it off at the top. The roots go much deeper.

Solutions abound, including ensuring kids don’t get lost early on in their school careers, focusing more on employable skills and connecting that learning directly to jobs, altering how we fund public schools so the disparities by neighborhood and by city/suburb aren’t so stark, making the path from school to work clearer for everyone, offering more “second chances,” gang interventions, and, the big one: creating more jobs at livable wages. Yet we don’t seem to have the will, or even the willingness to care, to solve this problem. We’re so preoccupied with budget ceilings and grand-standing about big government while screaming “no new taxes,” that we’re essentially sealing our fates. We need to create jobs and we need to re-engage a lost generation with a way to earn a living and make it in America. The American Dream has never been about “just hanging on.” But that’s what we’re coming to, very, very quickly.

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New report on whether college pays, and how much (ladies, we’re getting the shaft)

Posted on August 8, 2011 | 1 Comment

A new report documents  the payoff to college, and it finds the usual story–college pays– with a couple of interesting caveats.

But before getting down to the nitty-gritty….  some things never change. After all these years, you’d think women would have made more progress in the workforce, but alas, it is still the case that women must have a PhD to earn as much as a man with a bachelor’s degree. Yes, you read that right: a Phd = a BA.

A new report by the Heldrich Center on Education and the Workforce  details the lifetime earnings of men and women with different levels of education and finds that women who work full-time, full-year still earn 25% less than men with the same level of education. I was a wee tike in the 1970s with a poster on my bedroom door that read “Whatever women must do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”  And yet, here we are, nearly 40 years later, and it still applies. (I’ll save my rant for the end.)

The larger story of the report, however, is that those with more education earn more. Those with an AA earn more than those with just a high school degree, and those with an MA earn more than those with a BA.

During one’s working life (ages 18-65), a person without a high school degree who works full-time, full-year earns (at the median) just shy of $1 million. Median earnings for a person with a high school degree are $1.3 million, and on up the ladder until you get to those with Phd and professional degrees (like doctors and lawyers) who earn three times that of a only high school graduate. Those with a PhD earn $3.2 million and those with a professional degree earn $3.6 million.

In general, the magic number at the lower levels of education is $200,000. Those who didn’t graduate from high school earn $200,000 less than those with a high school degree, who in turn earns $200,000 less than those with an  associate’s degree, and so on. The gap doubles to $400,000 at a BA. A person with a bachelor’s degree earns $2.2 million over a lifetime, while someone with an associate’s degree earns $1.7 million. That $400,000-$500,000 gap in lifetime earnings is evident through a professional degree.

It’s handy that the authors factored earnings over a lifetime because about the only good thing about aging is that you earn more. So looking at earnings at a point in time doesn’t always show the long-term value of education. For example, among those in their mid 20s, the payoff to college appears to be a lot less. But by age 44, the gains are clear. Earnings rise for those with just a high school degree, for example, by 25% between age 25-29 and 40-44. For those  some college or an AA median earnings grow by 35% between early and mid-career.  For those with a BA, earnings rise 50%. For those with a master’s degre, they rise 57%. Professional (lawyers and doctors and the like) really make out. Their earnings double.

The question is, Is it worth it to incur the costs of two more years of college to get a 7% pay increase over 20 years of working? The answer: it depends. The devil is in the details.

From this simple parsing of the data, it’s clear that education pays. But surprisingly not always. The report’s authors note that since we’re now trained to specialize in an occupation, like phlebotomy, rather than working our way up from a mailroom to a CEO in an industry, like manufacturing, the type of occupation has a bigger effect on wage differentials by education than in the past. In some cases, those with an AA earn more than those with a BA, or the gap between the two is very narrow.

Health support services, for example, have the least gap in earnings by education. Therefore, it doesn’t “pay” much to get a BA in that field when an AA pays just about as much over a lifetime.  A person in this field with only a high school degree earns $1 million over a lifetime, while a person with a master’s degree earns about $1.2 million.

The biggest returns to education are in the managerial and professional fields. There, a person with just some college earns $2 million over a lifetime while a person with a master’s degree earns $3.5 million.

Interestingly, those working in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (called STEM by the education wonks) have relatively narrow gaps in lifetime earnings between education levels after a certain cutoff. A person still earns a lot more if he or she has a BA instead of an AA in that field, but there isn’t much difference among those with an AA, high school, or less than high school, and likewise, there isn’t much difference between those with a BA, MA, or PhD.  There’s differences–don’t get me wrong– but they’re not as sharp as in some other professions.

What I found intriguing was the relatively high share of people with little education who outearn their fellow workers with more education. About 30-40% in a given educational bracket earns more than those in the bracket right above them. So 31% of those with less than high school earn more than those with a high school degree. Likewise, 41% of those with only some college earn more than those with an associate’s degree. Forty percent of those with a BA earn more than those with a master’s degree.  The differences get smaller if you skip up a degree, but even then, one in five with an AA earns more than a person with a master’s degree. (See Table 1 in the report.)

Bottom line: education pays, but given its cost, you still have to be strategic and not overpay for that degree.  If you want to see the most bang for your education buck, become a doctor of some sort (aka “health professional”). If you want to earn a decent living and not spend a lot of time in school, go into STEM professions. There, a person with just a high school degree, some college, or an AA earns $2-2.5 million over a lifetime. (The reason for that, I’d guess, to the incomes of those “in computers” who don’t always follow the traditional path through school–but I’m just guessing).

The appendix of the report offers much more detail on earnings by education for 30 occupations. Worth a look if you’re wondering how much you can afford to spend on that degree.

I started this post with women’s earnings, and I’ll end there. It’s a sad state of affairs that as women outnumber men on college campuses and have made such strides in the workforce, we’re still penalized by about 25%. That means that over a lifetime, a woman with a BA will earn about $650,000 less than a man with a BA.  And this figure accounts for time off for kids.  As the report notes, had they defined lifetime earnings on the basis of all workers (not just full-time, full-year), the gap between men and women would be 20 percentage points higher. That is, if you count the time off for raising kids or other reasons to leave the workforce, a woman with a BA earns a whopping 44% less over a lifetime than a man with a BA (median earnings).

Sisters, wise up. We need to have this conversation, and we need to have it now. We need to start demanding a few things. First off, we need to learn to demand more money at the outset. If you think you’re asking for too much when you negotiate salary (you do negotiate, right?), just think of that guy who sat next to you in Econ 101. He’s making 25% more right out of the gates. So up your asking price by 35% and then bargain down. And at every stage in your career, remind yourself that you’re likely working harder and getting paid less. Some indignation is in order. After all, you have the leverage. You have the skills that today’s workforce needs–teamwork, people skills–you have the education, and you have the work ethic.  Now just demand the salary.  Think we don’t have the power? All women should walk off the job for a week and see what happens.

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Five-year high schools might defray college costs

Posted on July 27, 2011 | 2 Comments

We were temp-parents of two traveling German 20-somethings last week, and it gave me a chance to pump them for information on their high school/college systems– as well as show off the city I love.  I don’t know the details of the German education model in depth, but I’ve always thought, on the surface, it makes more sense than our system. Vanessa and Johannes–both on their way to university this fall– gave me a CliffsNotes version. That’s why the headline this morning that Maine is dipping its toe in the water of a five-year high school plan caught my eye.

The idea behind Maine’s program, which is still in the taskforce stage, is that high school students could take introductory-level college courses (both four-year college and two-year technical courses)  ”so that in five years of high school, they could graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree, or two years of transferable college credits, all for free,” reports the Bangor Daily News .

Now that makes sense. Encouragingly, they’re not ignoring vocational coursework in the planning process. The Times’ David Leonhardt may keep hammering on the point that four-college still pays (“The next time you hear naysayers poormouth college,” he reports, “ask them if they plan to send their own children”), but the reality remains: nearly half of all freshmen in four-colleges do not make it to graduation, and the only reason the payback from college is rising (for now) is because the bottom has dropped out. The wages of those with a BA have been flat since 2002 while the wages of those with only a high school degree are falling like the bottom tearing out of a grocery bag. What Leonhardt skims over in his argument is that the college premium, as it is called, is based largely on comparing the wages of four-year college grads with those with just a high school degree. It doesn’t typically factor in the wages of those with some college or a two-year degree, like in this chart. (And notice how flat the premium since 2002.)

We tend to believe that if we just funnel more kids into four-year college we’ll solve the problem of a declining middle class and a threatened standard of living, ignoring the other option: raising the wages of those with less education. But we’re hanging our hat on an assumption that is in many ways, wishful thinking. The number of available jobs depends not on the number of qualified candidates, but on the size and growth of the economy. The economy grows when consumers demand more things, not when we pass education reforms that encourage more kids to go to college.

There is no shortage of four-year college graduates.  If that were the case, employers would have gobbled up these underemployed (and underpaid) college graduates slinging drinks or working retail, at regular rates of pay. So the question is, how long before the surplus of college grads drags down their wages along with others?  As Econ 101 says, if there’s a surplus, wages for college grads will decline. Since 2002, their wages have been flat, so it won’t take much to push them into negative numbers.

We need, in other words, to talk about this differently. I’m not saying people shouldn’t go to college. I’m just saying that “college” needs to be expanded in these discussions to include viable two-year or even shorter technical/vocational programs. The “college for all” mantra is Wobegonian.  AND, we need to work on wages overall.

The Maine policymakers realize this it looks like.  As one taskforce member told the Bangor paper,  “We have to do more training that is tailored to the jobs that are out there and not just college or two-year degree programs.” Indeed, many needed skills for good-paying jobs can be obtained in a yearlong training program that could flow from a high school diploma, possibly at the same school building.

As one taskforce member put it, “He’s absolutely right and we have to look at that. I just paid $75 an hour to have my lawn tractor fixed. Maybe I am in the wrong line of work.”

Vannessa and Johannes would recognize this five-year high school model. In Germany, youth are slotted by around 4th grade into university tracks, vocational tracks, or a “bottom rung” track.

Before we go all ballistic about tracking, I’m not urging that. But there must be a way to connect kids early to hands-on learning that they engage with and enjoy rather than operating under the delusion that everyone is four-year college material.

In Germany, those with solid skills but less aptitude for “book learning” are required to do 10 years in school and then make a decision: continue on the university track for two more years or bail out and head over to two more years of vocational training. The key here is that the system makes this option visible early in life and there is little stigma to the choice. The kids do split off into separate buildings after tenth grade, which doesn’t make for much mixing between the groups and probably calcifies the class system, but we can work on that. (And even Germany is considering pooling everyone in the same building in the near future.)

Maine is on the right track, along with a similar effort in North Carolina. They are giving their kids more options earlier in life while trimming back the costs of college for those who attend. More innovations like these are needed rather than such a focus on prepping everyone to enroll in college. The door to college should never be shut for those who want to attend. But for those who do not, we need better options.  Let’s face it. We already track in this country: we have the college track and the track right into the State Penitentiary. How’s that working for us?

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How colleges stack up on price–a new site

Posted on July 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

Finally, a site that helps students and parents figure out how much it is going to cost them to go to college. The Dept of Education’s, College Navigator website added an easily navigated page that ranks colleges by costs.

You can look up costs by two- and  four-year public and private schools, as well as for-profit schools.  You can also rank them by highest and lowest costs of tuition alone and tuition net of scholarships and grants–that is, after subtracting the average amount of federal, state/local government, or institutional grant or scholarship aid from the total cost of attendance. The site also offers pricing information on community colleges.

Puerto Rico should be commended; they’re well represented among the least expensive public four-year schools (net costs), as are several schools in Texas, including South Texas College ($1317 net per year); Univ of Texas, Pan American ($1646 net); and a little further down the list, Texas A&M International ($4594).

On the other end of the spectrum, Pennsylvania gets a black eye. Of the 23 four-year public schools on the list of most expensive tuition (not net) in the country, 15 are Pennsylvania schools.

Topping the list of most expensive is Penn State ($14,416), followed in order by Univ. of Pittsburgh ($14,154). Just slightly farther down the list is a string of Penn State branches: Altoona, Berks, Erie, and Harrisburg branches, all at $12,750. Eight other Penn State branches are on the list in the $12,250 range.

The for-profit two-year schools with the highest tuition prices tags are the Cordon Bleu schools for culinary arts at around $40,000 a year. No wonder we pay so much for restaurant meals. Three of the Fashion Institutes of Design in California are on the list (at $25,000 a year), as are a couple of aviation schools ($39,000, which is somehow comforting to know), and the Art Institute of New York ($25,000). One automotive school–the Arizona Automotive Institute–is on the list ($32,000), which unless they’re teaching young people to work on Ferrari’s, I would think it’s not going to be a very good payoff.

The elite private four-year colleges with the highest tuition? Bates College in Maine, at $51,300 a year. The next five are Connecticut College, Middlebury College (VT), Union (NY), Colby (ME), Sarah Lawrence (NY), and Vassar (NY).

This is a fantastic step by the Dept of Education, and even better, they have said they will release information on graduation rates very soon. Huge. Can’t wait.

A few details to know when looking at the figures.

Total cost of attendance is the sum of published tuition and required fees, books and supplies, and the weighted average for room and board and other expenses.

Average net price is for full-time beginning undergraduate students who received grant or scholarship aid from federal, state or local governments, or the institution.

Knowing the “net” information is helpful because sometimes looking at just tuition alone scares off students who can probably get some funding assistance. One minor problem is that the figures are reported  for full-time beginning students. That last caveat is a bit of a problem, since it’s often second- and third-year students who lose their scholarships. But, those are quibbles. This is by far the easiest and most direct way to get a bead on college costs.

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