The View from Flyover Country

by Sarah Kendzior

  In 1968, $2,545 was about the most you could expect to pay for college—most schools cost half as much, and many public universities were still free. Faust’s generation graduated with little to no debt, unlike today’s university graduate, who owes an average of $27,000. After graduating, Faust decided to pursue a life of public service and got a job—an actual, paying job, right out of college—with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

  The hippie movement reached its height in 1968, but it is perhaps difficult for the modern mind to comprehend the desire to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” when such a novel option as post-college employment was available. Today’s graduate seeking a career in government often winds up in an internship, where they work full-time for little to no pay.

  In her article “The Age of the Permanent Intern,” journalist Hannah Seligson describes Jessica, a full-time intern at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who was paid $4.35 an hour during her ten-month tenure. Despite simultaneously shelling out $50,000 per year for a graduate degree at American University, Jessica says she felt lucky, because without internships and an MA she had no chance at an entry-level job. Seligson reflects: “Talking to her, I wonder: When did ‘lucky’ become working for below minimum wage for months on end?”

  Seligson is right: luck does not have much to do with it. In order to work the internship that is a requirement for entry in many fields, a young graduate requires substantial financial support as well as previous unpaid experience. “Almost none of the kids I meet in Washington these days even had boring menial high-school jobs working in a drugstore or waiting tables; they were doing ‘enriching’ internships or academic programs,” writes pundit Megan McArdle.

  Participation in these programs and internships is often dependent on personal wealth, resulting in a system of privilege that replicates itself over generations. McArdle compares America’s eroded meritocracy to imperial China, noting that “the people entering journalism, or finance, or consulting, or any other ‘elite’ profession, are increasingly the children of the children of those who rocketed to prosperity through the postwar education system. A window that opened is closing.”

  “Currency” Counts

  But for Faust’s baby boomer generation, the window was open, the opportunities there. Following the paid position she took after her four years of inexpensive college, Faust went on to get a PhD. She graduated in 1975, a year when over half of history PhD’s could expect to find a job in their chosen field, and immediately landed a teaching position at the same university where she studied.

  Today, only 42.6 percent of history PhD’s are employed upon graduation, and few in academia. Those who find jobs in higher education often work as low-paid adjuncts—a category that was miniscule in 1975, but now makes up roughly 70 percent of American faculty. Like internships, adjunct positions are often necessary to advance professionally—but only the well-off can afford to work them without living in poverty or debt. The result is a professoriate of an increasingly uniform class background, much like the policy, finance, and journalism circles McArdle describes. Mobility is but a memory. “The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data,” writes economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in an editorial aptly titled “Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.”

  To understand the repercussions of the current system, it is worth taking a look at another woman born in 1947, the same year as Faust. A few weeks ago, a meme began circulating on Facebook: “Hillary Clinton wrote to NASA as a child inquiring how to be an astronaut,” it said. “NASA replied that girls could not be astronauts. So she became Secretary of State.”

  The meme served as a reminder that opportunities in the 1960s were far more limited for minorities and women than now—a point Faust, Harvard’s first female president, has noted. It also meant to serve as inspiration for those whose dreams have been denied. But while barriers based on race and gender have eased—to a degree, with still a long way to go—economic strictures have tightened, denying the dreams of a new generation.

  One can argue that today the path to becoming an astronaut—one of the most notoriously difficult professions to enter—is more meritocratic for an individual of Clinton’s middle-class background than the path to jobs in policy and other fields relying on upfront costs and nepotistic connections. Astronauts do not labor unpaid for years; the children of astronauts do not automatically become astronauts.

  This is not to say that hardworking elites do not deserve their success, but that the greatest barrier to entry in many professions is financial, not intellectual. The ambition, hard work, and idealism of women like the young Hillary Clinton have no currency in today’s system, because only one type of currency—hard currency—counts.

  One wonders how many future politicians, journalists, academics, and leaders we are losing because they never have the chance to try. How many people from Hillary Clinton’s middle-class background—or, for that matter, from Bill Clinton’s rural poverty—can afford to tread the path of debt and unpaid labor required to succeed?

  The “lifetime of citizenship, opportunity, growth and change” Drew Gilpin Faust extolled is something most Americans desire. But it is affordable only for a select few: the baby boomers who can buy their children opportunities as the system they created screws the rest.

  —Originally published February 26, 2013

  The Millennial Parent

  I have a friend who was the first in his family to go to college. He grew up poor in the rural Midwest and earned his BA from a top school in the region. But when the recession hit in the early 2000s, he could not find a job. He decided he needed more training and applied to graduate school. When Harvard accepted him, he was thrilled. Within one generation, his family’s highest level of education went from a high school diploma to an Ivy League degree.

  A Harvard education was supposed to provide opportunity. But with the degree came debt. Now in his early thirties with children of his own, my friend’s social mobility has stalled. He wants his sons to have the same quality of education he did, and the professional advantages that come with it. But he does not see how this is possible. When his sons are old enough for college, he will still be paying back his own student loans. With wages stagnant and tuition fees well outpacing inflation, there is little chance he will be able to afford their education. His children will be back where he started. Mobility was a mirage.

  “It kind of sickens me to think I might have to say to my kids, ‘Hey, I went to Harvard but you can’t,’” he said. “The whole thing is turned inside out. People imagine that you are supposed to build legacies around things like that, and instead they can’t go there because I did.” My friend is part of the so-called millennial generation: young adults born roughly between the late 1970s and the late 1990s. While the start and end dates of the millennial generation are up for debate—and the idea of inherent generational traits is dubious—people of this age group share an important quality. They have no adult experience in a functional economy.

  Millennials are a favorite target of the media, who portray their economic plight as a character flaw. In a recent cover story, “The Me Me Me Generation,” Time declared millennials “lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.” While generational trolling spares no cohort, there was something particularly callous about Time’s depiction of young adults facing the worst economy since the Great Depression.

  “Have you seen your intern on Rich Kids of Instagram?” The Atlantic’s Elspeth Reeve writes, noting that the Time portrayal seems modeled on privileged interns able to work for free. “If so, he or she is probably not the best guide to crafting the composite personality of a generation that fought three wars for you.”

  “Adults still living with their parents” is the classic millennial trope. What is forgotten is how many millennials are parents themselves. As of 2010, 34 percent of U.S
. residents aged 18 to 29 had children, according to one poll. Fewer than one-third of people in this age group have a full-time job. They have minimal savings and the highest student loan debt in recorded history. Most cannot afford cars, homes, health insurance, or other material goods once considered basic elements of life in the U.S. How can a generation that can barely stand on its feet be in charge of another generation’s welfare?

  Lack of Options

  Being a responsible parent means planning for the future. But when many millennial parents look into the future, they see a void. Financial journalist Gillian Tett notes how economic polarization creates different cognitive maps. “If you were to ask wealthy Americans to visualize the future, they might well describe it as a carefully calibrated road along which they expect to travel,” she writes. “But if you ask poorer Americans, who are scrambling from pay check to pay check, they are more likely to perceive the future as a chaotic series of short-term cycles.”

  Millennials are almost uniformly poorer Americans. Those who are financially secure tend to have family wealth. According to a 2012 Pew survey, 38 percent of millennials say their current financial situation is linked to their parents’ financial situation. Millennials are chastised for leaning on elders, but the new rules of the economy demand it. Unpaid internships are often prerequisites to full-time jobs, and the ability to take them is based on money, not merit. Young adults who live off wealthy parents are the lucky few. They can envision a future because they can envision its purchase. Almost everyone else is locked out of the game.

  Dependence may be the primary trait of the millennial generation, but it is a structural dependence, caused not by “laziness” or “narcissism” but by a lack of options or social mobility. For millennials much more than for the generations that immediately preceded them, the future is determined by the past. The son is indebted to the debt of the father.

  When I ask millennial parents about how they see their children’s future, they tell me they do not like to think about it. It is one thing to discover, as an adult, that the rules have been rewritten, that the job market will not recover, that you will scramble to survive. It is another to raise a child knowing that no matter how hard they work, how talented they are, how big they dream, they will not have opportunities—because in the new economy, opportunities are bought, not earned. You know this, but you cannot tell this to a child. The millennial parent is always Santa, always a little bit of a liar.

  “Class Privilege”

  Some may argue that the children of millennials do not have it so bad. Even if their parents cannot save enough to pay for college, surely they can apply for scholarships. But in the new economy, scholarships are increasingly reserved for the rich. According to a report from the New America Foundation, colleges give “merit aid” to wealthy students who can afford to pay nearly full tuition at the expense of aid to low-income students.

  The goal is to increase the university’s prestige by building an affluent student body. But the consequences for social mobility are so dire that the authors of the study argue for government intervention. “Federal action is needed to ensure that colleges continue to provide a gateway to opportunity, rather than perpetuating inequality by limiting college access to only those who are rich enough to be able to afford it,” they write. The children of the millennials have been born into a United States of entrenched meritocracy—what Pierre Bourdieu called “the social alchemy that turns class privilege into merit.” Success is allegedly based on competition, not background, but one must be prepared to pay to play.

  “This reliance on un- or underpaid labor is part of a broader move to a ‘privilege economy’ instead of a merit economy—where who you know and who pays your bills can be far more important than talent,” writes journalist Farai Chideya, noting that this system often locks out minorities. By charging more for a year’s college tuition than the average median income, universities ensure that poor people stay poor while debt-ridden graduates join their ranks. By requiring unpaid internships, professions such as journalism ensure positions of influence will be filled only by those who can pay for them. The cycle of privilege and privation continues.

  The economy may seem bad now, but the true test will come in the next two decades, when the children of the “screwed generation” reap the meager harvest of their parents’ lost opportunities. Perhaps then we will return to the ideal of equal opportunity because we will have witnessed the long-term consequences of its erosion.

  In the meantime, millennial parents surrender their dreams in favor of survival. That is what a good parent does. It is much harder to surrender a child’s dreams as well.

  —Originally published May 29, 2013

  Mothers Are Not “Opting Out”—They Are Out of Options

  “The choice that is not really a choice” is one of the oldest tricks in parenting. Anticipating a tantrum or endless dawdling, the parent offers the child a limited set of options: “Would you like to wear the red shirt or the blue shirt? Would you like the carrots or the apple? It’s your choice.”

  The child, being a child, feels empowered. He is the one in control; he gets to make the big decisions. But this deception only lasts for so long. Eventually the child grows older and starts to dream beyond his proscriptions. He realizes there are not only two options, but a world of dazzling variety. He demands to be part of this world, but his requests are denied. He realizes he never had options after all, but that choice itself was an illusion produced by the powerful.

  If only his mother would realize the same.

  On August 7, The New York Times ran an article called “The Opt Out Generation Wants Back In”—a follow-up to a 2003 story about highly accomplished, well-educated American women who left the workforce to stay at home with their children. Ten years later, the mothers are seeking work that befits their abilities but most are unable to find it, causing them to question their original decision. The New York Times piece frames the mothers’ misgivings as a result of questionable planning and poor marriage partners, paying mere lip service to the tremendous change in the economy over the past ten years. Whether to work or stay at home is presented as an option that has to do with personal fulfillment and child-rearing preferences, divorced from fiscal limitations.

  But for nearly all women, from upper middle class to poor, the “choice” of whether to work is not a choice, but an economic bargain struck out of fear and necessity. Since 2008, the costs of childbirth, child care, health care, and education have soared, while wages have stagnated and full-time jobs have been supplanted by part-time, benefit-free contingency labor.

  The media present a woman’s fear of losing her career as the fear of losing herself. But the greatest fear of most mothers is not being able to provide for their children. Mothers with high-paying jobs go back to work to earn money for their kids. Married mothers with low-paying jobs quit to save money for their kids. Single mothers struggle to find work that pays enough to support their kids. Self-fulfillment is a low priority in an economy fueled by worker insecurity.

  The assumed divide between mothers who work inside and outside the home is presented as a war of priorities. But in an economy of high debt and sinking wages, nearly all mothers live on the edge. Choices made out of fear are not really choices. The illusion of choice is a way to blame mothers for an economic system rigged against them. There are no “mommy wars,” only money wars—and almost everyone is losing.

  Motherhood as a Financial Burden

  Here is how raising a child in America has changed over the past decade. Between 2004 and 2010, the average out-of-pocket costs for childbirth rose fourfold, making American deliveries the costliest in the world. Two decades ago, insured American women, on average, paid nothing. Today the average out-of-pocket cost with insurance is $3,400, with many insured women paying much more, and uninsured mothers charged tens of thousands of dollars.

  The average American woman begins the journey of motherhood paying off mountains of debt.
One could argue there is indeed a “choice” at play: the hospitals and health insurance companies can choose to stop inflating prices, charging for unwanted procedures, or refusing to cover necessary ones.

  But with the health insurance industry facing little accountability, the burden of “choice” reverts back to the mother. The skyrocketing cost of childbirth corresponds with the rise of the home birth movement, which, while appealing to some women for personal, noneconomic reasons, is also a way to try to dodge the hospital bill (for women with complicated deliveries, this “choice” is quickly curtailed). Like so many movements born in times of economic ruin, home birth is presented by the media as a lifestyle trend, a return to “natural living” much like the rise of bicycling (cannot afford a car), “shabby chic” (cannot afford new clothes or furniture), and gardening (cannot afford fresh produce).

  Desperate or pragmatic economic decisions are rationalized with moral superiority. In the post-employment economy, “opting out” is often code for “cannot afford a job.”

  * * *

  For nearly all women, from upper middle class to poor, the “choice” of whether to work is not a choice, but an economic bargain struck out of fear and necessity.

  * * *

  America is notorious for workplace policies that are unfriendly to mothers—we have among the shortest parental leave of any developed nation, with 40 percent of companies providing none at all. We also have among the world’s most expensive child care (although our child care workers are paid a pittance). The average cost of day care is $11,666 per year, with the average cost in some states as high as $19,000. This means that young parents, still struggling to pay off their massive college loans, are also expected to pay day care costs equivalent to college tuition.