I’m back from four fantastic days with 20-somethings in Philadelphia, including freezing my tusch in line for an audition for MTV’s Real World, hanging with the waitresses at Winberie’s, a long talk with parents, a “guy” shopping trip (grab pants, pay for them, leave), Philly cheese steak, Rita’s water ice, and countless hours talking with Kelly (pseudonym) and David (pseudonym) about their lives, their struggles, and their futures. It was priceless. And I thank them.
I was shadowing Kelly and David for research on our new book, about how the recession is affecting this latest generation to enter to workforce. I came away from it alarmed, afraid, sometimes hopeful, and more often than not, flashing back to my own early 20s—-the confusion, the excitement, the despair, the exhilaration. I also came away from it increasingly alarmed at the betrayal of our higher education system. Just let me go on record here as saying I think we’re staring at a new bubble, and it’s called the student loan bubble.
David’s story may not be typical, but it’s telling on many levels. David lives in a working class, borderline middle-class, neighborhood of Philadelphia. He grew up in a modest two-story home next door to his grandparents, who passed away a few years ago. His aunt lives down the street. He still hangs out with his high school friends, all of whom still live at home.
David is the kid on the football team who sits on the bench and who knows a lot of arcane trivia. He’s a huge movie buff, with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase of dvds in his childhood bedroom–a dark cave of wood paneling, piles of clothes, and clutter. His mom would love nothing more than to brighten up the room, but “David doesn’t like change.”
Overweight, nails bitten to the quick, he’s struggling to find his fit, at once sure of himself and yet wondering why he doesn’t get the call-back from the job interview when some of his other friends landed a desk job. He’s a “sucker for love,” as he puts it, a romantic who suffers from bouts of depression when things get overwhelming. He wants nothing more than to get on with life, find a 9 to 5 job and move out, get married and have a “baseball team” of kids, and the “white picket fence with the tire swing.”
Yet David isn’t moving out any time soon. He has $100,000 in college debt and two part-time jobs at minimum wage. He will soon owe $1,000 a month on those loans by his estimation. He earns about that much each month he told me over coffee at Starbucks the second morning. He also told me he is pinning his hopes on a bank teller position—one of the 200 jobs he’d applied for since graduation. The job would pay about $25,000 a year, which would allow him to start paying back the student loan and maybe move out.
David was an average kid in high school. He actually hated the whole affair and just phoned it in, doing the bare minimum to not flunk out. He wasn’t in any extra curriculars, and he didn’t talk to a guidance counselor but probably twice. He watched a lot of movies and stayed out of the way of his younger brother, who was rapidly becoming a serious juvenile delinquent.
And yet, he knew he’d go to college. “Every job you think of, you need a college degree,” he said. He’d originally wanted to go to a community college to get his grades up, but his dad, a laborer who removes asbestos in refineries, wanted him to go directly to a four-year school–the American Dream. David gathered the pamphlets he’d collected at a college fair and chose two that he thought he could get into with his low grades and that were far from home. He ultimately chose a private school in upstate New York–for $24,000 a year in tuition and $13,000 a year in room and board, with no financial aid, no scholarships, nothing. He chose the bank for his student loan based on the brochure the college handed out.
Four years later, he graduated with a BA in sports management in a town that is home to Wharton Business school, one of the best b-schools in the nation. He currently delivers pizzas for Domino’s for $7.25 an hour when he’s in the store and $5.25 when he’s delivering. He gets to keep part of the delivery charge and tips, but he pays for his own gas. If he works until 4a.m., he can clear $60-70 in tips in a night. He works three nights a week. His second part-time job is a check-out cashier at Kohl’s, scrambling to get 10 emails and 3 credit card applications every day for $7.50 an hour.
The debt weighs on him. He’s hoping for another six-month grace period where he will only pay on the interest in order to just save up a little bit more money. Then he hopes to consolidate and extend the loan out a few more years so the payments will be cut in half at least. “Something like that,” he said.
We argued in Not Quite Adults that college pays, and it does–if you’re strategic about it, and if you graduate. Two big “ifs.” Studies like those we cite in the book calculate returns to education based on medians or averages. The median wage after college, the average cost of college, and so forth. That’s of course necessary and certainly an accurate portrayal of the typical kid, or the typical return. But the average can gloss over, ironically, the average kid’s story—stories like David’s, stories that are increasingly becoming the norm.
The question I have is why did David think college was the only route? In part, the promise of college is the American Dream for working-class parents like David’s. David’s dad, a second-generation laborer, did not want his son to follow in his footsteps. He had bigger dreams.”College” was where that dream took form. Yet, the ins and outs of college were a blur. As his mom said, “we were naive. We just sighed a big sigh of relief when he got in. But we’ve wised up now.”
Middle-class high schools like David’s are complicit in this dream. The weekly school newspaper proudly prints the future plans of all its seniors, and stresses that the majority are college-bound. Granted, the high school offered “third-tier” students options like voc-tech, but it came with a whiff of loser. As David said, “the voc-tech kids were the kids who don’t do very well and this gives them something to do, some security in life.” Ironically, while standing in line for the MTV audition with Kim later in the week, she said when asked how many of her friends had jobs, “actually the only kids who have a decent job are the kids who went to trade school or cosmetology school.”
David came out of high school assuming that a paralegal needed a law degree and a x-ray tech needed a medical degree. Granted, he didn’t make very good use of his guidance counselor who probably would have disabused him of that notion, but his sense of things shows just how deeply ingrained this “college for all” mantra really is.
Colleges are complicit as well. They take in students like David without any compunction. They don’t have to worry about whether he graduates or not, or even whether he can afford it, because the spotlight is not on their graduation rates, only their enrollment rates.
So in the meantime, David lives at home, saddled with debt, and basically, as his mom put it, is just shoveling snow in a snowstorm. His parents, no stranger to financial strain, say they are happy to have him home. “We don’t mind doing this until he can get on his feet. We raised him to be independent, but it’s just not possible yet. I worry for him with that debt. That’s the mortgage on a fixer-upper around here. How can he move out with that?”
Indeed. As we sat talking, David flipped through the mail. A letter from the bank where he’d applied for the teller position was in the batch. He didn’t need to open it. He already knew. Rejected again.
