Millennials Are Up The Creek Without A Paddle

On February 9 on Time's Moneyland blog, Josh Sanburn took note of that fact that the Fewest Young Adults in 60 Years Have Jobs.

How hard has the Great Recession hit young adults in the U.S.? 

... The grim unemployment picture for young adults is clearly seen in Pew’s new report, which shows that slightly more than half (54.3%) of all 18- to 24-year-olds were employed at the end of 2011. That rate is only slightly higher than in 2010 (54%), but dramatically lower than the 62.4% rate of just four years earlier.

It’s the lowest rate since the government started keeping records in 1948...

When we look at the details, the picture is grimmer still.

One of the reasons that rate is so low today is that many, faced with the prospects of unemployment, went back to school.

Last year, 45.2% of young adults were enrolled in high school or college compared to 1990, when 31.3% were enrolled. Higher enrollment is probably a good thing for the economy long term, but it’s also a sign that many students felt they had no real hope in the current job market without more education.

But it’s also likely that many of those same students would like to be earning some money in between classes and can’t: Only 40.7% of college students have a job, down from 47.6% in 2007. (The employment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds not in school also fell, from 73.2% four years ago to 65%.) Unfortunately, fewer working students may mean they’re relying more on student loans to finance their educations.

It’s worth noting that the official jobless rate for 18- to 24-year-olds reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was 16.3% last year, a figure that counts as unemployed only those who are actively seeking work, which generally doesn’t include full-time students...

Let's not beat the around the bush. The so-called Millennials (aka. Generation Next, Net Generation, Echo Boomers) are caught in the No Good Paying Jobs Or Unmanageable Student Debt meat grinder. Remember, the Pew data refers to "jobs" in general, not good paying, career-starting jobs which might eventually lead to other such jobs which might eventually lead to love, marriage, households and kids. For so many of these young adults, the future leads only to enduring poverty or debt (or both).

Still, these young adults are wildly optimistic, both because they don't know anything yet and because people generally can not take a realistic view of the future, no matter how bad it looks. Josh Sanburn finished up this way—

Just don’t worry too much about our country’s young adults, since they don’t worry all that much themselves.

Despite their gloomy circumstances, Pew found, the group remains eternally optimistic. Of those aged 18 to 34, 88% of them say that they either earn enough money now or expect they will in the future.

In contrast, 28% of those over 35 say they don’t believe they’ll make enough money in the future. According to Pew: “While young people are less likely now than they were before the recession to say they currently have enough income, their level of optimism is undiminished from where it was in 2004.” And that was three years before the recession hit them harder than anybody.

The Millennials may not be worried, but they should be. Their timing is bad. They're on the wrong side of history. We are in the midst of the radical decline phase of the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. Bad luck.

So they may not know it yet, but the Millennials are up shit creek without a paddle. That's truly sad, an immense tragedy. And this will not end well in the not-so-distant future when their always precarious economic circumstances finally force these young adults to wake up to the fact that they've been royally screwed.

Comments

[Wanooski]

I know I'm up shit creek, and for now I'm not going to school so I don't drive up my debt. But none of my friends seem to get it, they still keep plugging along assuming that things are going to get better. How? They don't know, they just assume.