Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone

by Settersten, Richard; Ray, Barbara E.

  What we couldn’t capture directly in our research is whether social expectations for what it takes to live independently have also risen. Perhaps rather than the hard costs of housing, transportation, and groceries, something more intangible is keeping young adults with comfortable backgrounds from striking out independently. Perhaps the perception of what it means to live comfortably, what is “needed” in life, has changed for this group, leaving them with expectations that are too high. There is clear evidence that what young people consider luxuries and what they consider necessities have changed. According to a 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a nonpartisan public opinion research organization, growing shares of Americans considered things like cell phones, dishwashers, cable television, and other amenities “necessities.” The third-floor walk-up with iffy heating and a diet of ramen noodles is apparently no longer cutting it. With affluence comes a longer list of what people cannot live without, and thus Tom and others live more comfortably at home while saving money for their first home instead of opting for the third-floor walk-up. This, of course, is not true for everyone. But the children of better-off families are more likely to be living at home with their parents than those from poorer families.28

  Interestingly, the deep recession our country is in has caused people to rethink that list of necessities. Pew redid the survey in 2009 and found sharp declines in the shares of individuals who thought the above items were necessities, reassigning them to the “luxury” category. The numbers of items that the public deems necessities have retreated to levels not seen for a decade or more. We’ve all had a reality check, it seems, and perhaps that third-story walk-up won’t seem so bad in the future.

  Young adults are clearly not the spendthrifts they are made out to be. Many are saving, and some are living at home to feather a future nest or get a foot in the working world. Still others have made or are making investments in an almost certain return—a college degree. Another group, however, is struggling precisely because they have not invested in some form of higher education. The problem is not anchored in universities and ever-rising tuition—good-quality, low-cost options for higher education abound. If college costs continue to rise while family incomes stagnate, and if a college degree loses its value in the market, there may come a time when college won’t pay. That day is not here. And as a country, we cannot afford to see it arrive. As President Obama recently commented, “The countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow.” In the final chapter, we will discuss policies and programs that can help put higher education within reach for more young people and shift the current view from one of immediate costs to one of investment in themselves and future generations.

  3

  Job-Hopping or Job-Shopping in a Do-It-Yourself Economy

  Stand back all bosses, screamed a 60 Minutes episode in November 2007: A new breed of worker is attacking everything you hold sacred.

  “Faced with new employees who want to roll into work with their iPods and flip-flops around noon, but still be CEO by Friday,” the narrator intoned, “companies are realizing that the era of the button-down exec happy to have a job is as dead as the three-martini lunch.”

  Working hard, paying your dues, keeping your head down—those old rules have apparently been blasted out of the water. This generation is playing by a new rule book, having absorbed the ethos of a new breed of worker—the entrepreneur, the free agent, the foosball-playing, bring-your-dog-to-work whiz kid. Don’t expect them to sign on, shut up, and steadily climb the ladder. This generation wants it all now. As the 60 Minutes segment proclaimed, “Generation Y,” the under-twenty-four set, may have climbed Mount Everest and excavated Machu Picchu, but they have never punched a time clock and are used to being praised and rewarded for every act and gesture, even for simply showing up.

  Not surprisingly, this depiction raised some hackles with members of this generation, who make up approximately one-third of the U.S. workforce.1 Moments after the episode aired, young people vented in the way they know best. In two days, more than five hundred people logged their opinions on the 60 Minutes online comment board. “This is just maddening.” “Typical fark!” “What overly generalized blather!!!!” were characteristic comments.

  One comment that stood out was written by “Jillian,” a twenty-four-year-old from Nevada who is putting herself through college by working as a tutor:

  Why should we work so goddamn hard? … And with so many stories of retirees getting screwed or loyal employees being laid off after 30 years … I think our generation knows that we cannot rely on the government or company in the future, so we have to take care of business ourselves; do these qualities breed loyalty? NO. It simply causes people to base their lives on something of more permanence, such as friends and family. I don’t see a problem with treating a job as a job and not the center of your universe, especially since employers sure don’t feel that way about employees … I think we all recognize that most organizations only value workers for their effect on the company’s bottom line.

  With that, Jillian sums up the forces that have so profoundly altered the world of work for her generation. Time after time, the young people we interviewed raised these same concerns about the workplace: the insecurity of jobs, wages, and benefits, the disappearing loyalty of employers, and the ebbing centrality of work in defining one’s self and life.

  The MacArthur Research Network tracked young adults’ changing attitudes toward work since the 1970s and overlaid them with changing economic factors, such as declining job stability and weakening social contracts between employer and employee. Unlike the 60 Minutes segment, we delve beyond the quick, surface depictions of this generation to uncover a broader set of reasons for the shift in attitudes and outlooks toward work. Where 60 Minutes sees a self-indulged, entitled generation, we see an adaptive response to a dramatically altered workforce (with a little dose of self-entitlement).

  In many respects, Jillian is absolutely right. Why pin one’s life on an employer who will not be loyal; and why not instead base one’s life “on something of more permanence, such as friends and family”? We find that young adults across the board are questioning the centrality of work in their lives. But they are simultaneously hoping to find jobs with greater prestige and higher pay. These aspirations seem poised to crash headlong into a harsh reality. We look more carefully at this on-coming collision and what it means for the destinies of our swimmers and treaders.

  Generation Skeptical

  Jillian did not come to her conclusions in a vacuum. Jobs have changed dramatically in a very short time. Today’s generation has watched as their parents scramble to stay ahead in a new regime of “free agents,” “just in time” production, corporate downsizing, and globalization. The world of work has become increasingly uncertain, and it is an increasingly winner-take-all playing field.

  As the economy shifted from one of making things to knowing and designing things, it split, as the economist James K. Galbraith and others have argued, into three tiers. On the top end was the knowledge class, an economy based on brains not brawn. The idea economy designs the world, from technology, medicine, law, and architecture, to arts and culture, to financial markets. It reveres the swashbuckling entrepreneur and the creative innovator.

  Richard Florida, in his 2002 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, homed in on a very visible segment of this group, the engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, fashion designers, and, above all, entrepreneurs who are creative in spirit and innovative in design. By 2000, the creative class accounted for one-third of all American workers, and its earnings accounted for fully one-half of all income. This growing creative class points to a trend in American industry: Brain is replacing brawn.

  Members of the creative class are young, hip, diverse, and—with their double majors, advanced degrees, and entrepreneurial outlooks—they are also in demand. These ar
e the young workers who can afford to take risks and have thrived on doing so. They want jobs that reflect their interests and tap into their talents and potential, and they want to work with interesting and creative people who can teach them something new.2 They want to believe they are being heard and, through their jobs, are contributing to something bigger than themselves. Above all, they want to love their work.

  “I will not settle for a career I am not truly passionate about,” said Sean Aiken in his own manifesto on work in 2008. Sean, the twenty-six-year-old Canadian who managed to finagle a book deal out of his restlessness, epitomizes the quest for an impassioned job. In his ongoing struggle to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up, he struck on the idea of trying a job a week for a year. In 2007 and 2008, he traveled the country at the invitation of employers—ranging from fashion designers to park rangers to bakers and dairy farmers. He worked at each job for exactly one week, donating his wages to charity. “One man in search of his passion” was his tagline. He posted this on his blog on March 23, 2007:

  I am really excited about my generation entering the professional world as I feel we are realizing how important it is to be in a career that we love doing, one that challenges us, and we are demanding more out of a career than just a pay check. As we enter the work place with this increased awareness, we immediately start questioning everything, seeking a greater meaning in all that we do, something that makes sense. To be in a situation in which we feel like we are contributing to some greater good, some vision that we can buy into. How is what I am doing helping the world, helping those around me, helping my neighbourhood, how can I be more socially responsible, what can I do to make a difference?

  Sean will no doubt aim for a job in the knowledge economy, most likely among the creative class. He displays in spades some of the qualities that will make him very attractive to businesses: fantastic self-marketing savvy and great social and organizational skills. While he and his peers create and design the new products of tomorrow, the second tier of workers in the redesigned economy will produce them. The constant threat of automation and outsourcing, however, has chipped away at mid-tier workers’ bargaining power, and thus their wages have stagnated and their benefits dried up. The hollowed-out middle, once dominated by well-paid, secure manufacturing jobs, where young adults without a college degree could find a path to the middle class, is now a ghost of its original self. The $20-an-hour jobs with a pension and health care have been replaced with $10-an-hour jobs with few if any benefits.

  Jason is one of those workers. He spends his days as an automotive mechanic in an Iowa car dealership for $12 an hour. Jason is no slouch. He knows the meaning of hard work. As a teen, he worked after school and weekends alongside his father in their backyard shop. His father was supplementing the family’s farm income with an auto shop to make ends meet, and Jason pitched in when he could. In fact, Jason preferred this work to high school. After high school, he earned a quick training certificate and immediately went to work at the dealership. Now he spends his days racing against “the book.” This is the time that the corporate execs decided it should take to replace spark plugs, do a tune-up or an oil change, and the many other car repairs that Jason does each day. His take-home pay is determined by the book time versus the actual time it takes him to do the job. Changing spark plugs becomes a literal race to beat the clock. Take too long and it is unpaid time. That pretty much sums up the sense of frantic desperation in mid-tier jobs today, as does this picture of life in the once-mighty manufacturing sector.

  As dire as this picture may seem, life in the middle is not as bad as life in the economy’s bottom tier—which has been the fastest-growing segment of the labor market. The bottom tier is the service economy, whose jobs—whether housecleaners, nannies, and busboys or Costco clerks, X-ray technicians, and personal trainers—are more nimble, but also lower paid and less secure.

  One thing all workers have in common in the new economy, regardless of what they do, is the unrelenting pressure they are under. For the white-collar worker, that pressure means the leisurely three-martini lunches that 60 Minutes refers to have been replaced by a BlackBerry and a frequent flier card. The once-packed 5:30 train home to the suburbs is nearly empty as the hours logged at the office mount toward sixty- and seventy-hour workweeks, and work no longer ends at the office elevator. The pressure to produce is enormous. Today’s elite workers catch the 7:30 train, zip by the drive-through for dinner, cram in homework time with kids, and, once the kids are in bed, check email and pack in a little more work before collapsing into bed themselves around midnight, lest they be bested by some other hungry employee waiting for a chance. The unending demand for faster technology, the increasingly complex world of high finance, and the incessant pressure to innovate keep white-collar knowledge workers both in and under high demand—well paid, but stretched thin and in positions where they must prove their worth each day in order to stay.

  The blue-collar worker feels a different pressure—a pressure derived mainly from insecurity. The company man is fast becoming a museum relic. “What has emerged,” says Peter Gosselin in his book High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families, quoting economists James O’Toole and Edward Lawler, “is a social contract in which employees understand they have jobs for as long as they have the right set of skills and … the organization has the resources to pay them.” Our own research finds that in 1973, about one-half of men between ages thirty-five and sixty-four had been with their current employer for at least ten years. By 2006, fewer than 40 percent could make that claim. Another take on this scenario: More than three-fourths of those born in the 1970s had a stable job at age twenty-six (defined as having held it for more than forty-eight weeks). Only two-thirds of those born in the 1980s could make that claim.3

  Work–Life Balance

  The impact of these myriad forces on work life is enough to make anyone reconsider where and how work fits into life, as this newest generation so decidedly has. The MacArthur Network’s research finds the echoes of these big changes in the shifting attitudes toward work since the 1970s. Young people today are less likely to expect and therefore value job stability than they were in the late 1970s and 1980s, and they are increasingly comfortable with change. While they may not expect to be at the same job for very long, they do want that job to be rewarding, both monetarily and personally. They like jobs with prestige and extrinsic rewards. They also want to be integral to the decision-making process at work. Yet, and here is where 60 Minutes comes in, they are no longer as keen on putting in overtime or spending time learning new skills. Finally, young people across the board are becoming less likely to see work as central in their lives and in defining who they are as individuals. They also hope to find a better balance between their work and outside lives than their parents have. The willingness to climb a corporate ladder or invest heavily in a career is simply less inviting to today’s young adults. Jillian offers a hint at why.

  After reading Jillian’s post, we contacted her to find out more about her. She grew up in Nevada, the daughter of two middle-class parents trying to achieve the American dream. Her mother worked as an X-ray technician and her father at a variety of jobs, including a lucrative stint in real estate. With their rising incomes, Jillian and her sister were able to enroll in one of the wealthier school districts in the area. However, this idyll would all soon crumble.

  During Jillian’s teenage years, her older sister, Margaret, began to run with the wrong crowd. At home, she was explosive and moody. The family tiptoed around her wild mood swings, doing everything they could to avoid setting them off. But Margaret grew increasingly unmanageable. As Jillian’s mother focused her energies on Margaret, her work performance suffered. After missing work once too often, she was summarily fired. “After fifteen years of being a good employee, they fired her!” says Jillian, still astonished. Jillian’s father also let his job suffer. Defeated and now broke after sinking their life savings into Margaret’
s care, the family lost their home and declared bankruptcy.

  “I guess that showed me that you cannot count on a company for everything.” Just as the rising divorce rate has made many members of this generation skeptical of the institution of marriage, this shredded bargain between worker and employer has made them skeptical of the institution of work. As our interviews so often revealed, young people are wary of counting on one employer for a steady income, and they shy away from investing their entire identity in their job. Anna, who is working as a script developer at Twentieth Century–Fox, is not interested, for example, in “snaking my way up the corporate ladder” at the expense of her health and sanity. “Work can’t be my whole life,” she says, “my happiness really does mean a lot to me.”

  The Network’s analysis of an ongoing annual survey of high school seniors confirms Anna’s and Jillian’s skepticism about work’s centrality in life. In 1980, three-fourths of young people saw work as being central to their lives. By 2004, only 60 percent thought work would be a defining aspect of their lives. Supporting our findings is a recent survey by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute that finds about one-half of workers under age thirty-seven put family first compared with 41 percent of Boomers. Furthermore, Baby Boomers, the survey reveals, more often “find themselves” through work. It stands to reason that having children might alter one’s views about juggling work and family and the centrality of work, so the researchers also zeroed in on parents. When they compared the priorities of Boomer parents with younger adults with children, young parents today were still less work-centric, suggesting a strong generational shift, and not just a “life cycle” shift, in attitudes toward work.