Trevor Nunnally didn’t expect to be living in his parents’ East Cobb home at age 33. Kennesaw State’s Rebecca Mattox, 21, worries nobody will hire a history major. David Anderson, 22, can only find work washing sheets at a Lawrenceville massage parlor. Kalynn Littleton may take on $40,000 in grad school debt to one day, hopefully, land a job in the hospitality industry.
“It’s very scary, especially the thought of not getting the best job out of college,” said Littleton, 20, from Sylvester in South Georgia. “I have dreams and plans, but I’m not really sure I’ll get there or where I’ll land.”
The Great Recession and its aftermath are an equal-opportunity, all-ages destroyer of dreams, yet the impact on the nation’s younger generation is perhaps their most insidious legacy. The job and wealth prospects for the “millennial generation” are considered the worst since World War II. And now, like then, hard economic times are shaping the attitudes and actions of young Americans.
Labor Day is a time for parades and picnics, an end-of-summer reverie on the status of work and workers. But for the fourth year in a row, ever since the recession began in late 2007, the picture isn’t pretty. The nation’s unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at 9.1 percent. In Georgia, it’s 10.1 percent.
For young adults age 20-24 in the United States, the jobless rate is 14.8 percent, ensuring that the Great Recession’s scars will run long into the future for the next generation of American workers. Not surprisingly, today’s 20-somethings share many of the same parsimonious values of their grandparents, many of whom grew up during the Great Depression.
The men and women who came of age in the 1930s and ’40s saved money, lived frugally, clung to jobs and never forgot that hard times were a lost paycheck away. Successive generations, unfamiliar with hard times, grew relatively fat and happy along with the dynamic post-war economy. The good times ended in 2007.
“These are children today of the Great Recession,” said Michael Thurmond, former Georgia labor commissioner who worries about the job prospects for 20-year-old daughter Mikaya. “We won’t know what the economic, social and cultural impact will be on them years into the future. But, clearly, they’re having to recalibrate their dreams and expectations based on very harsh economic realities.”
Chalk it up to naiveté, or the promise of youth, but many millennials remain optimistic about their futures. The Gallup polling organization recently reported that 57 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 say it is very or somewhat likely that they’ll have a better life than their parents.
“I’m ready to do what I need to do to get somewhere,” said Mattox, the history major from Acworth who has applied for a Fulbright scholarship. “But I may have to compromise and come up with a backup plan. In this day and age, I have to do what I have to do.”
Many doubt better life
Mattox was 10 years old when 9/11 happened. The first decade of the 21st century was a boom-bust whirl of incredible growth and riches followed by employment, housing and debt debacles. Only 44 percent of Americans believe today’s youth will have a better life than their parents, according to Gallup, the lowest rate since the question was first asked in 1983.
“At one point, back in college, I thought I’d eventually get a better job with better pay than my parents,” said Nunnally, a Devry University grad who works part-time at Staples in Woodstock. “You guys grew up when salaries were $40,000 or $50,000 a year. Now you have to get by on $7.50 an hour.”
The Pew Research Center reported last year that 20-something unemployment is at its highest level in more than three decades. The jobless rate for Georgians aged 20-24 was 18.4 percent last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than double the rate for Georgians aged 35-44.
And it takes longer for college-educated millennials to find their first job, too. The Class of 2011 found work after 7.74 months of looking. For the class of 2010, it took 6.95 months, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported.
“It’s bleak. I’ve applied to a lot of different places and people don’t get back to you,” said Snellville’s Anderson, who makes $7.50 an hour at the massage parlor. “I’m just looking for any job. But I have no reason to think there’ll be a quick turnaround in the economy.”
The U.S. Conference of Mayors predicts Atlanta’s unemployment rate won’t return to pre-recession levels until late 2014 — at the earliest. Lack of a job and financial independence will, naturally, inhibit spending and the accumulation of wealth and further slow any economic recovery.
Generation Opportunity, a nonprofit, commissioned a poll in April showing that 44 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds will delay buying a house and 28 percent will delay saving for retirement. Any rebound in the housing market is likely a ways off.
Pew reported in 2009 that 13 percent of parents say an adult child has returned home within the last year.
“When I lost my job I had to move back in with my folks,” said Nunnally during a recent job fair at Roswell United Methodist Church. “I’m used to being my own boss. Moving back in with my parents was like, ‘Ah, I don’t know if I can deal with this.’ But I had no choice.”
In surveys and interviews, the millennials say, given the economy and high unemployment, they’ll likely postpone marriage and child-rearing.
“The ‘scarring effects’ of prolonged unemployment can be devastating over a worker’s career,” the Joint Economic Committee, a bipartisan congressional panel, reported last year. “Productivity, earnings and well-being can all suffer.”
Once younger workers do land a job, the pay is likely to be low. Long-term earning power will take a hit because the years of lost income from unemployment may never be recouped. Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale University, found that each percentage point uptick in the jobless rate translates into a 7 percent pay reduction for new graduates.
“If I make it to the level of my parents — they’re both college deans — I’ll be really happy,” said Kennesaw State’s Mattox. “But I’m not all that confident that I will. I’ll probably have to settle for something less.”
Better timing for boomers
Mattox’s mother, Cheri, harbors the same worries of any parent, yet her uncertainty is amplified by the weak economy.
“My biggest fear is that my daughter will go through four years of college and maybe grad school and find out that there are no jobs to sustain her as an adult and then she’s left with, ‘What do I do now?” said Mattox, dean of student support services at Chattahoochee Technical College. “I fear she will make inroads in a career and those inroads will be taken away from her.”
Cheri Mattox, 49, is a baby boomer, the generation that rode American peace and prosperity to riches and rewards. She grew up in Tilden, Neb., with parents who survived the Depression and vowed that their daughter would lead a better life. Her father spent two years in college, enough education for a career engineering plastic syringes.
“He had limited opportunities growing up and he didn’t want me to have the same limited opportunities,” Mattox said. “He was mostly concerned about money and being able to afford a car if he wanted one. He wanted me to do better than he ever did.”
Everybody is a product of their generation. Depression-era babies, familiar with 25 percent unemployment and empty cupboards, scrimped and saved their entire lives.
“I’m a baby boomer and my parents were part of the Great Generation that [survived] the Depression and World War II,” said Karen Andrews, director of career services at Kennesaw State. “So it really wasn’t a challenge to have a better future than them because we didn’t have it as tough.”
Boomers expected their children to do even better.
“They coddled their kids during the booming economic times and the expectations were sky-high from parents, teachers and everybody else that great things were expected of them,” said Andrea Hershatter, a senior associate dean at the Goizueta School of Business at Emory University, who has written about the millennial generation.
“But the notion that these students believe that they will be better than their parents has disappeared entirely. The new benchmark is to live in a lifestyle to which they have been accustomed to by their parents.”
Still, some 20-somethings remain hopeful.
“The experts say my generation does not seem to have as many opportunities, but I reject that,” said Duluth’s John Davenport, 28, a jobless graduate of the Candler School of Theology at Emory. “If anything, my generation has a leg up because the idea of a career is changing. We have been told, and it’s true, that you can’t work for 40 years for the same company and retire with a pension. We expect to have multiple careers.”
Getting that first job, though, remains tough.
“Sometimes it feels a little hopeless,” said Anderson, a Georgia State grad who moved back home. “But I still feel very young. There’s plenty of things I can do. I’ve just got to figure out how to do them.”
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