Tag Archives: 20-somethings

Marrying down

Posted on February 4, 2010 | 2 Comments

My mother pooh-poohed every boyfriend I ever had. I think it was a sport for her. She dissed them because, according to her, they weren’t good enough for me. She had dreams of me marrying up, as they used to say.

Today, mothers might do well to give their sons the same advice.  About one-fourth of women today earn more than their husbands, up from merely 4% in 1970, according to a recent Pew survey.  Says something for women’s earnings gains (and education gains) since the 1970s, no doubt. And good for us. But it also overlooks another possibility: that men’s earnings have declined more rapidly than women’s earnings have increased.

As I alluded to in the last post, the job force today is a cut-throat pursuit, even before the current downturn. Men with less education have been losing out big-time. After adjusting for inflation, men with only a HS degree earn about $4,000 less a year today than they did in the mid-1970s, while women who have only a HS degree earn about $4,000 more today (mainly because women had a lot more room for growth, starting as low as they did).

Even one rung up among college graduates, men’s wage advances are not keeping pace with women’s.

For men with a college degree, their earnings increased by $4,780, while women’s earnings increased by about $12,000.

No wonder in our interviews with young people for  Slouching Toward Adulthood, we heard a sense of betrayal or, at the least, bewilderment among men. The world they had known –the company man, the lifetime career on the factory line on the sales floor– is gone. They’ve been battered by some big external forces that caught them coasting on their good looks, you might say. Meanwhile, girls had their noses to the grindstone and were picking up degrees and moving up the career ladder. Or in the case of the working classes, they were becoming the main breadwinner (often on paltry service sector wages) while their boyfriends/husbands tried to find a foothold.

And so we arrive back to “marrying up”: as the Pew Study alludes: “In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriage enhanced the economic status of women more than that of men. In recent decades, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men than for women.”

Ah, progress.

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Posted in work and earnings

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20-somethings don’t have it so easy

Posted on February 2, 2010 | 8 Comments

When I was in my 20s, I basically screwed around. I delivered pizzas for Dominos (in Feb. in Mpls–brrr), I filled book orders for 5th graders in a book warehouse, I sold car stereos, and I went to media-arts school from 2pm-9pm, the perfect schedule for a 20-something. I took nothing seriously. I spent a lot of time in bars. My friends and I caroused through Minneapolis, catching Prince at First Ave, and the Wallets or Willie and the Bees at dive bars. Music, flirting, and friends were the agenda.

It was a more forgiving world.

As many of you know, I just finished a book on twenty-somethings, due out some time in the next decade (long story, it’s actually coming out jan 2011). If I could pinpoint one thing that I’ve come away with from writing that book, it is this: today’s young adults have to bring their A-Game or they’re toast. It’s a high-stakes world out there. If they screw around today like I did in my teens and twenties, they might very likely end up forever shopping at Wal-Mart and stretching the food stamps until the end of the month.

As we all know, the pressure cooker starts early today, in kindergarten practically. High school is nearly unrecognizable to those of us who went through the paces in the 1970s.  (I showed up for my ACT test on a Saturday morning after a late-night out with some girlfriends–no prep, no pretests, not even much realization what the test was all about. Think about it. Can you imagine?)

Kids today are brighter, bolder, more ambitious (and yes more entitled) than any recent generation. They have a resume before college.

But not all kids–and here’s where the destinies begin to diverge. Some parents, despite their best efforts, just don’t have the understanding or insider tips about how the new game is played. They do their best, but they still believe the school of hard knocks is the best way to learn about life. They don’t push for more education or provide a carefully guided and cultivated path. Or maybe the young adult himself is just not college material–hates school or just never connected for whatever reason. What happens to these kids when their peers are so uber-qualified and are practicing so hard and diligently at  this game? Do those without the stellar credentials stand even a fighting chance?

This latter group used to head to the factory floor or the family farm. Or like me, they dabbled in this and that and eventually landed on a track that offered some form of career ladder, learning the ropes on the job, and then advancing to the next level. I dropped out of the Univ of Minnesota, went to a technical school, managed to land a job in a small publishing firm, and from there pieced together one semi-related job after another until I had enough experience to become an editorial assistant. I followed that path because I liked to read. Period. No one guided me.  There was no plan involved, believe me. My path  simply took shape behind me.

Today I truly doubt that I could follow that same meandering path and end up on my feet like I’ve managed to do. I’d be outdone on paper by those with a master’s degree from Medill (and even that’s probably not enough). It frightens me a little that we’ve carved out these deep ruts in the ground: either “good” college and internships and networking (mostly parents’ connections), professional careers begun at age 24, OR start college, drop out (roughly 40% of those who enter college drop out), start over at a community college, take years to get a degree, work retail at $10 an hour if you’re lucky (poverty level wages), and try to eek out a living competing against your peers who are stars.

There are few factory jobs anymore, and those that do survive are nonunion jobs with little security and paltry pay. The other option is the service sector, the majority of whose jobs are not well-paid. The state of IL has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000, and it has about 400,000 more workers earning poverty level wages than in 1980 when I graduated.

What this all does is create a huge divide between those whose parents were positioned well enough to be able to cultivate their children from day one, and those whose parents believed in the school of hard knocks. It puts a lot of pressure on parents. A lot. It puts a lot of pressure on young people. And it risks hollowing out the middle, leaving our society looking like a dumbbell, with people on either end but very few in the solid middle class. That just can’t be good for a country built on a dream.

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Posted in millennials

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