The Education Hoodwink: Generation Y’s After-College Disappointment
The Baby Boomers raised a generation of children with high hopes for strong education and fruitful careers. With many of these children now having completed their educations, they are unable to find the jobs they were promised. They held up their end of the deal and completed twenty years of education to become qualified to enter the business world. Business, on the other hand, has responded with nothing but broken promises and disappointing opportunities. Some jobless graduates turn to internships, enrolling in online courses, or graduate school in the hopes of riding out the economic downturn, but others don’t have the financial luxury of doing anything but find whatever work they can in a dismal job market.
The Myth
The Boomer generation understood the value of a good education. In their eyes, a basic college education was requisite to a healthy and successful life climbing professional ladders and chasing various versions of the American dream. They told their children of the wonders a good education would provide: they could pursue any topic they were passionate about, become doctors, scientists, academics, writers, lawyers, or any of a range “good” jobs. All they had to do was go to school, work hard, get internships, volunteer, and gather work experience. Build a resume, and the jobs and security and fulfillment will come.
But they didn’t come. Instead, a fifth of American millennials are unable to find work, many fear Generation Y will become America’s new “lost generation.” The opportunities the job market is offering are not what they expected and, like history’s other lost generations, they are growing disillusioned with the generally accepted idea of a “good career.”
Over-Qualified
Research shows millennials are one of the most educated generations in history, yet face one of the worst job markets ever. Many college-educated millennials have resorted to moving back in with their parents, and are eagerly working hard to find a job, any job. Most jobs available, however, are woefully low-paid, especially for recent graduates staring down student loans. Twenty years ago, a college-level education would have overqualified graduates for minimum-wage service jobs and entry level office lackey positions. Today, young graduates wrangle for these opportunities to make at least some money, having to dramatically lower their expectations of the job market and their futures.
Opportunities After College
Graduates do have options aside from going out and working at coffee shops, of course. In major financial centers like New York and Los Angeles, graduates are still finding openings with big investment banks, consulting, and technology companies. Such good opportunities, though, are few and far between, satisfying a dismally small proportion of the total number of qualified applicants.
Many graduates are opting for more education or unpaid avenues of professional development. Some bide their time gaining specialized experience from internships, but not only are many of these unpaid, nowadays few lead to full-time positions.
Is College Really Worth it?
This is a natural question, especially with the influx of overqualified graduates working at jobs totally unrelated to their academic qualifications. Skipping college altogether, along with the attendant student loans and four years of lost job experience, seems like a good strategy for entering the job market. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple.
Today’s is a generation for which going to college is par for the course when finding a higher-than-minimum-wage job. Because the market for these jobs is now flooded with collegiate applicants, a college degree has become equivalent to a high school diploma, a minimum requirement to find any reasonable paid employment. Perhaps most importantly, this means when the economy does recover, businesses will only have access to pools of college graduates who’ve missed years of potential professional experience for lack of work, and this is a troubling prospect indeed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marina Salsbury planned on becoming a teacher since high school, but found her way instead into online writing after college. She writes around the Web about everything from education to exercise.
Bea Fields is the President of 
