Seven years ago I wrote a cover story for the Village Voice headlined "A Sleeping Class: Young Americans Fight for Every Cause But Their Own."
Starting with that story, which later became a book, my beat was the economic headwinds young people are facing: mounting student loans, credit card debt, unemployment, unpaid internships or short-term, part-time, no-benefits jobs that have them joining a new "precariat."
I asked why the young, so ready to march against Iraq or for Sudan, weren't fighting back, as a class, for economic justice.
It took half a generation and a global economic meltdown, but now they finally are. Occupy Wall Street is Generation Debt at the barricades, on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr, expressing their deep sense of betrayal. At the heart of that betrayal, the one issue that comes up over and over again is student debt.
College tuition has grown more than any other good or service in the Consumer Price Index since 1978, the average student loan debt is now over $24000, and the collective student loan debt surpassed the nation's aggregate credit card debt last year and is currently headed for a trillion dollars.
Why does this feel like such a betrayal? Because college is the centerpiece of the American dream. We tell our children that if you have both merit and gumption you'll be handed the chance to prove yourself on a level playing field, with both financial and personal rewards. And so it's our nation's college students -- the ones with an average age of 26, the ones who are burning through their youth with a cycle of part-time jobs and part-time classes -- who are now raising their voices to tell us that the dream has gone hollow.
That's what this movement is really about. That's what makes it so hard to ignore. Millennials, like all young people throughout history, have been pilloried for their sense of entitlement and lack of perspective, but that's exactly what gives them the moral high ground here. They feel entitled to a better future than what they're facing. They believe, as they've been taught to believe, in an America of rising prospects and expanding opportunities. They're not living in that America anymore.
So the challenge for Generation Debt at the barricades is to reach high in imagining what kind of country they DO want to live in. Because the old American dream -- a house in the suburbs, two cars, two kids -- is neither widely sustainable nor frankly desirable.
Every generation since Plymouth Rock in America has made good -- they have made more money than mom and dad. That stopped with those of us born after the late 1970s. We are actually making less money and we have less stuff than mom and dad. And that's going to last.
What we do in response to that comeuppance is really going to determine what history thinks of us. For the sake of the planet, we need to develop a very different set of values and put emphasis on different kinds of rewards. It's not just about reforming our existing institutions to create a slightly stronger welfare state, a tiny bit more progressive taxation or a smidge-less-rapacious consumer economy. It's about better ways of organizing creation and production: just a few names for it are the solidarity economy, the Sharing Economy, Plenitude, resilient communities, DIY, Makers, the Mesh.
I'm so happy that my generation is finally fighting back. But now I realize fighting is not enough. It's time to build, because the future belongs to us now.
Follow Anya Kamenetz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Anya1anya
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Exactly! We must stand up for ourselves through Intelligent means of Capital creation. We must create what we want for ourselves. We must become the solution we are looking for.
http://RockTheDebt.org http://DefaultMovie.com
It's turning out the same with the rest of the job market. Availability depends on creation of new jobs, which we all know is a major problem, but also previously-occupied jobs opening up. The economy sucks, so again why would the parents and grandparents with more stable jobs decide to retire now? They expect to live longer than earlier generations, and their investments have serious potential to tank (if they haven't already). No logical reason to give their jobs to someone else.
We essentially built a system in part on naturally-created vacancies, which aren't as much of a reality anymore. I guess we could move to India to get jobs, since so many opportunities we might have had were sent there in the last decade.
Here is my concern: Hourly productivity has been rising since the 1970s, but wages have fallen... this is in no way unavoidable, though if we continue to allow windfall gains to flow to those who own and those who are representatives of those who own, we will never see wages even come close to approaching a reasonable proportion of productivity.
As badly as those who have moral problems with the industrial state want it to fail to provide increasing amounts of wealth, it has consistently defied their expectations... the problem we have now is one of accumulation and exploitation, something the old school Marxists once predicted, and the far-sighted like Roosevelt (pick one) and Keynes worked to prevent.
First, attending college is NOT a quintessential part of the American Dream. How can it be when less than a quarter of Americans go to college and that number has been as low as 10% within living memory? The American Dream may come by way of a job that required a college education, but it is socially presumptuous to claim college is a precondition: what would generations of blue-collar union workers say to such a statement?
Second, the price of college is a lesson for young adults (and their parents) in the economics of supply and demand. While demand for a college education has soared over the past generation, the supply has not; ergo, price goes up until demand matches supply.
Finally, many of these problems go away if students go to college to get a valuable education vice spending four years partying. Graduates with professional degrees (e.g., engineers, science/med majors, accountants) face far lower unemployment than do business and arts and letters majors, and won't be applying to unpaid internships in the summer either.
Students and parents need to be smarter about college. If they don't figure it out going in, they will learn it the hard way.
Actually, supply HAS increased as well, but perhaps not as fast. The more important culprit behind prices is the fact that steadily increasing availability of government backing of student loans and Pell grants are a direct subsidy for colleges and have artificially sped up the increase in demand while providing no incentive for colleges to keep prices low.
"Finally, many of these problems go away if students go to college to get a valuable education vice spending four years partying."
You assume that students who don't get the degrees you mentioned are automatic partiers. Untrue. You also assume that all students can handle the rigor of those professional programs; I'd wager that many/most students can't handle the rigor of college in general and shouldn't be attending.
Anyway, even if all students were capable of succeeding as engineers, scientists, etc. (which they aren't), our job market can't absorb as many people as quickly as it once could. And student loans can no longer be discharged in bankruptcy; and if students skip college they won't have the credentials to take on certain jobs, so they'll still be screwed (unless they do vocational training, apprenticeships, etc.) so the problems you mentioned have staying power.
They must be throwing in Comunity Colleges and Associates degrees.
Hell thats not even a years tuition at most State four year colleges.
-AJB