So, you moved back in with your parents!? A question many from my generation have been asked in recent years. “All of our lives we go on waiting for the day that we get to break away from our pasts, to escape our childhoods and join a new and improved realm of adulthood… But then one day you have to return to it all; you’re forced to return to where it all began” writes Erica Allaby in her article The 3 Phases of Returning to Your Hometown. But what if returning to our hometown after college wasn’t the backup plan, but the goal?
According to the Huffington Post and a Pew Study, many millennials are moving home and living with their parents. While this is initially bad for the housing markets and those linked to it, it might have great benefits for employers who understand and embrace the change that is coming.
Boomerangs, as they have been coined, are here to stay, at least for the time being and many of them are college educated and motivated to further advance their career while safely living under the umbrella of their parents. For some, they are going to require a skill before they obtain a well-paying job. In 1970, only one in ten Americans had a bachelor’s degree, and nearly all could expect a comfortable career. Today, about a third of young adults will earn a four-year-degree, and many of them — more than a third, by many estimates — are unlikely to find lifelong secure employment sufficient to pay down their debt and place them on track to earn more than their parent writes the New York Times.
The combination of high student loan debt delayed emerging adulthood, and theGreat Recession has created the phenomenon we see today. According to the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, there are a great many job openings throughout the state that go unfilled, with the majority of them being in customer service. Annual growth statistics project an increase in CNC machine operators, registered nurses, and food preparation and serving workers. All of these require less than a bachelor’s degree.
Wisconsin’s unemployment is below the national average with total non-farm jobs expected to increase gradually. Projections for 2010-2020 see increases in maintenance and repair, machinists, pipefitters, and metal fabricators all of which do not require a four-year degree.
So what is the solution? How do we fix the problem of over-educated, underemployed, indebted millennials living at home? Maybe we need to look at the system to better understand the problem; a system that sets many of our young people up for failure and many business owners scrambling to find a willing workforce.
I believe the answer lies somewhere within a discussion surrounding the ideas presented in the Ivory Tower, a documentary that questions the cost and value of higher education in the United States. As someone who attended a private college and is still paying off student debt, I can assure you that this topic and the ramifications from it is something I am reminded of every month when I write the check and ask myself “was it worth it?”
While knowledge is priceless, how do we assign a value to a college education? One can’t fully see the investment’s potential upon completion of his or her schooling and there isn’t a guarantee that a degree will grant financial success. Earning potential is often listed alongside degrees, further funneling students towards higher paying jobs and the institutions behind the projections.
Maybe we need to look at how we define success and the culture we’ve created around the College Industry. Education has long been the great equalizer, allowing those who attain it to break down social and economic barriers, yet as recent tuition costs have increased while wages and standards of living have decreased. Keep in mind that all this has happened in an era when information is free and readily available at our fingertips. What has happened to Adam Smith’s invisible hand? As educational resources have become more abundant we should have seen a decline in the demand for higher learning, but in fact, we have seen the opposite. This has and will continue to stratify and widen the gap in socioeconomic classes in the US: the American Middle Class is losing ground.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2014, the median income of these households was 4% less than in 2000. Moreover, because of the housing market crisis and the Great Recession of 2007-09, their median wealth (assets minus debts) fell by 28% from 2001 to 2013. Meanwhile, the far edges of the income spectrum have shown the most growth. At the same time, the shares of adults in the lower-middle or upper-middle income tiers were nearly unchanged.
Ultimately, “Generation Y” just wants the same opportunities as their parents, but at what cost? How much do we have to spend in order to attain the same lifestyle we had in our youth? Essentially, borrowing from our future and gambling on the present; it can feel like a game of craps. There is no universal number on how much you have to spend on your education in order to reach the middle class, however, when looking at economic indicators based on geographic location, we can gain a clearer picture of what types of education best fit the projections for job growth. Here in central and northern Wisconsin, data supports technical degrees as the best viable solution for high school students seeking affordable education.
The College Board reports Wisconsin In-State College tuition is roughly $9,000 a year; this in comparison to a two-year degree from a local technical college averaging just under $13,000 with a higher likelihood of regional employment. Furthermore, I believe that soaring costs of education are at least partially to blame for added stress resulting in higher national rates of anxiety and depression among college students. A recent article published by PBS in September 2015 attributes less stigma to the increase in mental health services on campus; which will likely continue to increase the cost of attendance as more students require these services.
So what can we do as a community and as business owners and educators do to make a change? First, we have to affirm that there is indeed a problem, I would imagine that America’s elite are perfectly fine with the way things are, however, they’re likely to think differently when the easiest solution is simply to increase taxes on the wealthy, which I don’t believe will solve the problem. Furthermore, because college is a business with ties to both the State and Federal Government, there is money to be made at the expense of the naive taxpayer. According to the Boston Globe, just 40 percent of the financial aid money being distributed by public colleges is going to students with documented financial need. Most such money is being used to offer merit-based scholarships or tuition discounts to potential recruits who can enhance a college's reputation, or appear likely to cover the rest of their tuition tab and to donate down the road. Who is holding these institutions accountable?
Second, we need to realize that this is a cultural issue and the only finger pointing to be done is at ourselves and the lies we believe. An ivy league sheepskin or a 4-year college degree does not make you a more valuable person, for most it means that you met the standards by which you were allowed entrance into an institution that has gained its reputation by admitting bright students and producing, or at the very least, marketing the strengths of its students to the general public. The ACT and the SAT at their core are velvet ropes designed to tell students which colleges to apply for. This number becomes a student’s new identity; it is the number by which they will measure themselves against their peers and this number, in conjunction with their GPA, will be how they measure their worth against the perceived branding value of the institution they would like to attend; believing that it is the institution that produces the value, not their work ethic, character, and innate humanness that gives them worth.
Lastly, we have to want change and embrace it. Change that causes us to think differently about the way we view human life, growth, and profitability. For some, those who have broke the mold and the conventional model of the American Dream, are causing a paradigm shift in the way my generation views success. For Millennials, this is the great irony of the Great Recession. It was a crisis caused by the credit and housing bubble collapse of the mid-2000s as a result of greed and fraud on wall street surrounding the housing market. Yet, it will likely end up having the most lasting negative impact on the generation that didn’t own a home before the bust. This fact made more widely known by the recent movie, The Big Short. This partnered with a marriage decline and the belief that wanting to own a home ultimately brought the world’s economy to the brink of ruin has resulted in a completely different life plan that doesn’t include a utopic retirement, because we’re fully aware that our Federal Government is broke and social security is a Ponzi scheme that is expected to run out in 2037.
Success doesn’t look the way it use to and our parents, who currently may be paying our bills don’t get it either. Success for my generation will be a shift from business as usual to something that economist Umair Haque calls "Betterness"and environmental leader Billy Parish calls "Making Good." According to the Harvard Business Review, striving to do more good is associated with greater profitability, equality and asset returns, and value creation. GDP is no longer the metric by which we are measuring success. KLD score, corporate governance ratings, and other metrics of corporate ethics are becoming the new norm. Those who are aware of this trend are realizing that doing meaningful things is way more powerful that doing what is most profitable. American capitalism is changing in ways we can’t fully anticipate, but it is already affecting the way investors make decisions and the way companies structure their long and short term goals. Is it affecting the way you make decisions? If not, maybe it should.
The world we live in is changing and for small towns like Medford, Wisconsin we’re not exempt from the change. If anything our community is embracing it and through devoted community leaders and business owners, we are looking for ways to grow and thrive in this current social, educational, and economic paradigm shift. We believe that in fostering a culture of “Home Grown Success” our community will continue to be a gem of the Northwoods. We must invest in the lives of our students by creating local opportunities for them to gain valuable information and experiences that allow them to make better-educated decisions concerning their future. Together we must break down the stigmas that exist surrounding our current secondary educational system and support legislators and lobbyists who work to maintain local control so we can continue to strive for meeting the needs of our citizens. Our companies and small businesses need to strive towards “Making Good” embracing a generation more interested in social injustice and global warming then in bottom lines and profit margins. Our local government needs to be intentional about funding our communities schools and libraries; supporting entities and projects that will attract strong local talent. Furthermore, as a community we need to create a gracious environment that encourages our young people to take risks and empower them to make mistakes and start businesses. Failure is no longer moving home and living in the basement, it is accepting this as the status quo and not seeking solutions. As employers, we can seek to build a work culture where employees are motivated by personal growth and time off with loved ones rather than bonuses and overtime time. If we don’t have healthy homes and individuals, we won’t have healthy sustaining businesses. Remember we mostly like aren’t going to be able to enjoy early retirement with the rising cost of health insurance and in the insecurity of Social Security, so we need to be able to enjoy life now! Yolo is the mantra of my generation. And lastly, we need to welcome our neighbors and the transplants that choose to make Medford their home. Success starts with Growing Roots and establishing a foundation dedicated to the personal and professional goals of others.