“There are families we know whose kids took a gap year… after college graduation.”
That’s quite common is many countries. I know the Aussie’s all do that after they graduate college.
My niece and her now H went to Europe and bummed around but they did some things they wanted to do for money (like work at an organic farm in Spain.) Then they came back, moved to SF and got jobs.
“We are talking about someone else’s kid not our own.”
We have a winner!
I’ve read different places that perhaps there is an effort to shift blame, for the economic climate in which our kids find themselves, from the baby boomers to coddled, too PC millennials so we boomers won’t have to feel so guilty.
As a group we boomers didn’t have such significant student debt or such worries about access to health care. We actually could work our way through some state schools without debt. We could go to hang out in Paris with affordable health insurance. I remember buying it on a grad student budget.
Some do have access, but we have had multi page threads about this. I remember a 5 minute meeting with an insurance person and writing a check so small, the amount is lost in time.
I remember pensione prices then.
I’ve had a pretty good experience with the quality of work from millennials. The issue I have is (the few I’ve had to deal with) they do not respond to emails, which is our primary form of communication. If I request status updates - my emails are ignored. Nor do they pick up the phone - I think with the constant earbuds/music. I have to physically walk over to their desks to get answers. It’s very frustrating.
As far as my D, I feel like I’ve tried to instill a sense of work ethic as well as teach about money matters, but I don’t really think she will really get it until she’s out on her own. As many have said, since they’ve had it pretty good growing up, it’s tough for them to understand what it took for us to get here.
I think I might have D take the basic loans in college so she feels she has stake in the game. I also like the idea of “matching” money for her to put it into a 401K so she gets used to doing it early on.
In my company we have quite a diverse staff. We have a large section of aging employees who have been with the company twenty plus years. We also have young employees; some are part of the flex staff, meaning they are not full time.
About six years ago we revamped our management level to try something new. We set up teams and they were empowered to get the job done, on schedule and keep the client happy. They were required to be at work (nature of the business) but they could set their hours as long as they met the basic requirements for wage and insurance. The management team backed away and did not micro manage the team at a close level. Six years later we are planning on returning to the old way, at least for large portions of the work. People are unhappy with the looser management style, and the responsibility they need to take. It has been a surprising experiment and it just seems that people by nature eventually wind up being unhappy with status quo.
The young staff has been pretty wonderful. The FTE staff, I can’t say have come off as privileged. There have been good employees and unsuccessful ones.
The flex staff has the right to work or not work on any given day. They have other work options and can choose. Again some are good and some not so much. I don’t see a pattern I can make blanket statements about.
The seasoned employees are far more entitled and more ridged about demands, it is not easy to keep them happy and satisfied.
My daughter and her friends who fall in the entitled college educated group have jobs that pay the bills and they have side endeavors as an outlet for the creative calling in their life. They have grand plans to grow this part and eventually be able to quit their “boring” jobs. Whether this ever happens will be one of life’s lessons. Options are a luxury that I did not have, nor did I envision it any differently. I wish them all success. It is not easy becoming an adult in this time in history.
In the law context, I wonder how much of this is related to the up or out structure? If the percent of first year associates who eventually make equity partner is in the low single digits, many may see the brass ring as unobtainable.
Or in some cases, not incurring debt period because the local public colleges were exceedingly nominal or even free for instate/local area students which largely benefited the White boomer generation*.
All of that ended from the late '60s till the mid-'70s(1975 was when CUNY/CCNY started charging tuition for local residents).
Coupled that with much better economic conditions, lower minimum required educational requirements for gainful employment(one could get a well-paid middle/upper-middle class job with a non college-prep HS diploma or even as a HS/middle school dropout), lower housing/real estate costs, and average wages…including minimum wage if adjusted for inflation, the boomers have, on average, had it much better than latter generations.
Just a month and half ago, an older cousin recounted how his recently passed father despite having a college degree and accounting certification from the US was limited to being employed in a clerk position which only required a few years of HS solely on the basis of his race. It was only after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the mid-'60s and changing attitudes towards racism that my uncle was finally able to be hired for the job matching his college education and accounting certification trained.
Ironically, once he was hired as a CPA accountant, his work ethic/performance was such he was retained and promoted until he retired decades later whereas many of the racist colleagues and superiors who took umbrage at his initial post-Civil Rights Act promotions were let go due to poor performance and entitled attitudes derived from being “real murikans”.
I should also add that I saw some of the same entitled attitude my uncle recounted to his sons during my undergrad years with too many boomers and older Gen-Xers* locals in my rural NE Ohio college town in the form of them feeling entitled to upper-middle class jobs with minimal HS or even as HS/middle school dropouts.
Spoiled Boomers! 
Parent of three millennials here. They are each different, but, wow, none of the three are anything like what is discribed here. I can’t even imagine that they would feel work owes them something or need to be coodled.
My kids were most likely the “privileged.” They have no student debt and attended private colleges, had all the costly extracurricular activities in HS, traveled abroad in HS and basically were " given everything."
Yet each of them are happy to have jobs, fringe benefits and a salary. They all have traditional jobs that require them to be there at a certain time, have X number of days off, and X fringe benefits. They are actually grateful for their fringe benefits in this day and age.
As I said,they are all different. S seems to be ok not advancing in his job. He also still lives at home at 30. Some might say this is a “typical” millennial. I say there is something else, probably mental, wrong.
D1 is extremely successful as far as earnings is considered. She bought property in Manhatten, one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, at age 27. Yet she tells me she wants to walk away from it in 5- 10 years and do something else. She said she does not want to get caught in the wealth trap. She is saving a lot so that she can do this. This is the most millennial one of my kids have gotten.
D2 is still just working on her career. I cannot even imagine she would expect or make any demands from her employer. Maybe because she works in higher education for a pretty liberal employer.
Every time there is an economic recession, there are likely many recent college graduates doing involuntary gap years due to being unable to find jobs.
I agree. It’s not.
I’m a Boomer raising teen/early 20’s millennial kids. You can imagine the gap in expectations. They are hardworking, but have expectations I would have found laughable at their age.
H and I are boomers born in the late 1950’s. Our 5 children were born between 1990 and 1999.
I graduated from law school with $28K in debt (over 100K today) and H had about $20K. We both graduated in the mid-1980’s. I never had Paris because I had to get right to work. The following year, I was finally able to go to Europe for the first time but only because a friend who worked for an airline helped me with ticketing by getting me a courier fare (which no longer exist due to terrorism concerns).
My oldest son is 26. He didn’t like college so he dropped out and worked odd jobs for several years. On his 25th birthday, I sent him a long text advising that he would be off my health insurance in one year and he needed to do something about that. He now works for the USPS, with his own health insurance (I COBRA his dental at $16/month because he isn’t eligible for it yet), union membership, etc. He still lives at home, which is fine with me because I have younger kids at home anyway. Little by little, I am cutting back on what I provide for him. He uses my cars, which I insure, but I don’t give him gas money. If he doesn’t like the food I have purchased for the house, he buys his own. I pay his cell bill, but he has given me the 20% discount he gets from being a federal employee to apply to the account. He pays for netflix, which the entire family uses.
Do I think that my son is lazy and underachieving compared to where I was at the same age? Yes, I do. At his age, I was already a practicing trial attorney, living on my own in NYC, paying my student loans and being self-supporting. I would never have dreamed of asking my mother to make a doctor’s appointment for me as he recently did! I was SO happy when the doctor’s office asked if I would like them to deal directly with him. I gave them his number and he is now on his own in that regard. He was not hearing me when I said to just call and do it yourself.
My D is 25 and has a masters in sped. She worked as a teacher in NYC for one year, then quit and volunteered for a social services organization for the next year. I was freaking out. She went from earning $50K+ to making $600/month and living in a horrible area. Now, she is looking for work and has just started taking cases as a SEIT (special ed itinerant teacher) at $72/hr. She lives with her bf, who is 23 and a computer software engineer earning over $100K. He wasn’t born in the US, though he is now a citizen, and I only know his salary because he called me to discuss options for his retirement funds and benefits. His parents don’t live in the US and aren’t American so they don’t know our systems. I make my D put money into a Roth each year and she doesn’t have the account info or password so she can’t take the money out. That’s another generational difference - my parents regularly looted my savings accounts to pay the bills so when I got old enough, I refused to share any financial info with them. I, however, supervise my D’s retirement account because otherwise she would be of the “I’m not interested in money” ilk. I hope that when she is ready to buy a house or an apartment (something I am trying to interest her and the bf in for tax reasons), she can use some of it for a down payment.
My kids, like the vast majority of their friends, are good kids who have a great deal to offer. They are socially aware and active - my kids volunteer (my D met her bf at a volunteer event), as do many of their friends. They are different from us - H and I were raised by children of the Great Depression, and our kids were raised by baby boomers who did better financially than their parents. My kids are not spoiled and they are not snowflakes (although our jet black cat is).
One thing to keep in mind is that the attorney job market was much healthier(understatement) back when you started your career compared to law graduates in the millennial generation who graduated right before, during, and after the 2008 recession and the subsequent implosion of the legal industry.
It was still comparatively rosy when my HS classmates(Tail-end Gen X) graduated from law school in the early '00s and started their biglaw/attorney careers. That hasn’t been the case since 2008.
That and the full-pay cost of even a public U law school for an in-state student starts off at $150k or $200k for private law school means most millennial law graduates can’t duplicate what you’ve experienced unless they either graduated in the top half to 2/3s of a top 14-20 law school or regional law schools with strong ties to the local market or graduate within the top 10% or higher of law schools ranked further down.
That and not everyone has the inclination or the talents necessary to be a good attorney…especially a trial one.
And the above was underscored by one occasion a few years ago at a friend’s apartment party, the conversation among most of the millennial party attendees and mostly graduates from public undergrad/grad schools majoring in mostly pre-professional fields(including a few public MBAs) turned to commiserating over heavy student debt.
It was very awkward when they asked me about my student debt situation and I admitted I had none as I had a near full ride FA/scholarship package in undergrad and the only loan I took out was a tiny one which was paid off within 6 months of graduation a long time ago.
Turns out I was the only person in the conversation who had no student loan or any educational debt. However, if I had been just a few years younger and/or been dumb enough to accept my NYU CAS admission offer, I’d have been in the same worrisome financial situation they were in.
The millennials I know are my kids and nieces and nephews. They are all hard-working and great. My S has a full time and part time position. They don’t complain and have closer relationships with parents than we did with our folks. Careers have changed–S was encouraged by his boss to switch jobs after 2-3 years so he could get a promotion and raise.
I’m glad folks are thinking more about work/life balance. IMHO, this is a good thing.
The tuition at public U is well below $150k for in-state at many places. You might get $150k if you include living expenses, but those should be at least partially defrayed by summer positions.
They’re also thinking more about how to manage two people’s careers and perhaps also the challenges of parenting, instead of just stumbling into it.
That’s assuming paid summer positions are available.
That was certainly not the case after 2008…especially with the law students I knew who attended local/regional public or other law schools below the top 14.
Heck, even the friends who managed to graduate into the few scarce bona-fide legal jobs who weren’t “no-offered” at the last minute ended up in situations where they were making $30-$50k/year while having $150k-$200k in law school debt with that cumulative interest and a very high chance their law job won’t be there the next year due to budget cuts/law firm downsizing.
That employment problem is not new. It was a problem in 1993 as well…