As an eighteen-year-old I feel secure in pointing out that expectations of my level of maturity are far lower than they were for my father, let alone my grandfather. I believe that people generally rise to meet social expectations. Whether the drop in maturity level is due to the drop in expectations or the other way around, I don't know.
As a father of a teen I concur. I'd also suggest that teenagers role models in the 20-30 year old age range all act like children (IMHO, see any TV show aimed at teens) and offer little or no inspiration to 'grow up'.
The older generation expect little of the younger generation and they live up to that. We seem to think we are doing them a favour by indulging them in an eternal prepubescent spending spree.
It seems to me like developing maturity is in part tied to the responsibility you're given. Nowadays kids aren't held responsible for much, even after they turn 18, so maturity comes later and slower.
Doesn't every single generation say this? We've got writings showing Socrates making the same complaint. If every generation keeps saying this, then doesn't that call its accuracy into question?
I'd be a lot more comfortable if these sorts of claims were based on more objective data.
I think one of the significant reasons in emancipation. Due to the strong coupling between man and woman this affects both genders. Young females today (20-30) are fairly confused about what they want to do in life, and when to do it. Get married? Have children? Cook? Be pretty? Screw around? Do a Phd? Go to work? Have a career? This also confuses guys: what can you expect from your girlfriend, and when? And what do women expect from us?
Have you looked at what income you'd get today if you had only the educational attainment of the average man of the last generation at 18 or 20? Or the one before it?
You can't live the same level of life without more schooling now.
It's an educational arms race. Graduate degrees and unpaid internships and long stint in "entry level" jobs that last for much of a decade, etc.
Bs. I do quite fine with high school. The biggest advantage those growing up in today's environment have going for them is that everyone else their age is lazy. You can do far better today with the same work ethic of the previous generation.
It is an educational arms race, however in any arms race there is plenty of money to be made selling arms.
Fuck unpaid internships, get a job at a small company where results are noticed. When you see something going wrong step in and fix it. I started my career in programming putting together a simple scheduling app in php. I didn't ask permission I went and coded it at home and brought it in one day and demo'd it to my supervisor. After that they didn't want me doing tech support any more and wanted me solving all sorts of other problems instead.
Whining about education is a crutch used by those who don't want to fill out resumes or otherwise work. Generally those people feel that now that they have an education all they need to do is sit back and wait for a cushy job to knock on their door.
Before one gets a degree they should type that degrees name into a craigslist job board and see what comes up, if nothing comes up then one should not expect to get a job as a result.
I wanted to add one more piece of advice, when you decide what you want to do, find the industry where that job is the "profit center" and also in the "profit center" pick the job no one else wants to do. Yeah, sometimes it actually really sucks, but usually there is just a little learning curve, and then it's easy. Never tell them this. You're now indispensable, likable, and if you saved your money properly you also have negotiating power. This means that you're likely to be offered a raise, if you ask for one accepted, and if they decline have the means to make them give it to you or find something else, and surprisingly at the other company no one wants to do X either.
Pro Tip: If you've just bought something major on credit (car, house, etc), your boss probably knows about it, this means that you will NOT get your raise for the thing you bought that you can't afford. This is also why if you talk about cars or houses with your boss he may convince you to buy something you don't need. The people who get raises are those who don't need it.
I disagree with the language but heartily approve of the message. Do. Not. Work. For. Free. For-profit corporations can pay you wages -- that is what they are for.
This goes triply for everyone here, since most of you have skills that the market actually needs rather than the collection of non-skill represented by your typical coffee gopher trying to break into publishing. However, people expect engineers to be congenitally incapable of negotiation and to work for free because they love their jobs, and they'll tell you that this is not merely permissable but morally praiseworthy and a good thing for your career. People who tell you this are lying to you. Do not listen to them, even if they are folks you otherwise respect, even if they are telling you that their OSS-using corporations are more morally deserving than e.g. Microsoft or Oracle.
> For-profit corporations can pay you wages -- that is what they are for.
The worst example I've seen related to this is my friend (business major) who almost didn't take a paid internship because she had already agreed to do an unpaid internship and would feel bad abandoning the company. I had to explain to her how bad of an idea it is to be loyal to a company that doesn't even value her enough to pay her.
Oh I hate unpaid internships. However of late, lots of people have been pushing them around and people are getting bold because the labor department isn't enforcing the crap out of the law in this area.
Personal anecdotes aren't valid pieces of evidence...
The biggest advantage those growing up in today's environment have going for them is that everyone else their age is lazy. You can do far better today with the same work ethic of the previous generation.
... and neither are broad generalizations. In fact, the college admission process directly contradicts your misguided conceptions [1]. (Whether young people are working hard towards the right goal is another debate, but they are working hard.)
You're going to have to do much better if you want to argue that an extensively researched and reported global trend (degree inflation) doesn't exist [2,3,4,5]. Enough of this hurr-durr-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-because-that's-what-I-did bullshit. People who point out the issues with education are hard working people who have valid concerns. They aren't "whining".
Actually anecdotes are evidence. They don't prove correlation or causation in themselves but they are evidence. Also none of your "extensively researched" evidence proves causation. At best you can point to correlation. What I'm saying is that hard work and intelligent choices have far more of an effect on your life than "a degree". Unfortunately those types of things aren't easily compilable. Universities are selling a solution to a self created and self perpetuating problem. When everyone has a masters the answer will be to get a phd and when everyone has a phd a new degree with be made. In 100 years you can expect baskin robins university with 31 degrees. I don't doubt that education is valuable but you can get it much cheaper than by going to university.
Would you be skeptical of "research" from the cigarette manufacturers that said tobacco is good for you and that tailor mades are the best way to get it? Color me unconvinced that more schooling is the answer.
It could well be that a degree is the best way to spend a half million dollars but I don't think it is.
You're doing something horribly wrong if you're spending half a million dollars on a degree. Even if you include opportunity cost, it's nowhere near that high on average. I'm not really sure what purpose that type of exaggeration serves.
Of course I agree with platitudes like "hard work and intelligent choices have far more of an effect on your life than a degree", but if you're going to frame the problem in that broad of a sense why should we even discuss it?
I really don't find these anecdotes convincing. There's been a fair bit of research showing that the college wage premia is large and positive. Now, there are lots of arguments to be had about the mechanism by which that premia arises and to what extent it is fair, but its existence is not in question.
A degree is not much more than a fresh start, a foot in the door, and some residual credibility.
That's true in some fields. But in some fields, you simply cannot succeed without a college degree. If you want to be a civil engineer designing bridges, you need a college degree. If you want to be a physician or even a registered nurse or physician's assistant, then you need a degree. Period.
> There's been a fair bit of research showing that the college wage premia is large and positive. Now, there are lots of arguments to be had about the mechanism by which that premia arises and to what extent it is fair, but its existence is not in question.
Not many people are arguing it doesn't exist. People (or at least I) am giving evidence that college is not the only way to obtain this "premia," and that there is a cost, beyond which if college exceeds that cost, college is no longer favorable over its alternatives. Of course this is highly dependent on the university attended and the degree received and also depends on the individual involved. To blindly say, "college is always better" ignores all this evidence and turns off our minds to alternatives.
Do you honestly think the modern world can be navigated just as well by someone with drive and a 4 year degree as someone with an equal amount of drive and the training from the 4 year degree on average?
The world isn't designed for you. It's designed for all people, and for the vast majority of people, they need a much greater amount of training and education to get the same life their parents had by their age.
I call BS. If you work in fast food or retail you won't be well off at all. But if you lack a college degree or even a high school diploma and go into construction, landscaping/yard maintenance, plumbing, automotive work, or a factory job (very much the same "meat and potatoes" jobs of older generations) you will actually be making significantly above median wages.
As for college, on average I suspect it's a wash, income wise. For every graduate with an engineering, science, or business degree who is able to jump into a cushy high paying job at most a few years after completing school there are 1 or more graduates with less economically advantageous degrees in softer liberal-arts disciplines who gain almost no advantage in job hunting from their degrees.
"construction, landscaping/yard maintenance, plumbing, automotive work, or a factory job"
Traditional jobs are the first to go in tough economic times.
Trade school is a short term play. The world is only going to get more complex. While trade school might make someone better off in their 20s relative to someone who went to college, in the long term it will severely limit their opportunities.
The roads always need paved. I live in Ohio, where the cost of living is very low compared to much of the rest of the US, and jobs working on state highway projects pay over $18/hr. It's manual labor and it's dangerous to be near the roads, but it's far from the worst job you could have.
I mean, I'm sure there are some very high paying jobs that don't require a college degree. But there are millions of people that lack a college degree who want to work. Shouldn't we assume that the vast majority of these people will not get high paying jobs and will be lucky to get 30 hours a week of minimum wage work?
Why should we assume that? Unschooled does not mean uneducated and it sure as shit doesn't mean unskilled. There are more and more people who hold the belief that the age of apprenticeship, of transiting from novice through journeyman to professional entirely through entirely on the job training, is over, but that belief is false as can be. There are many, many people making bank earning as much as 4 year science and technical degree holders are earning who hold nothing more advanced than a HS diploma, and sometimes not even that.
Almost all such jobs involve significant amounts of manual labor, so that world tends to be rather disjoint from the world of college education and office jobs so there is definitely a lack of visibility from one world into the next. But that world does very much exist. The guys fixing your car, mowing your company's lawn, catching your seafood, transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock, resurfacing the asphalt on your street, putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road, assembling your cars, sometimes even the guy working in the deli section at your grocery store, they may be making much more than you previously thought.
Do you have any statistics on just how many of these high wage jobs exist? Because I know a lot of people who lack college degrees who would kill for a job that pays over $10/hour.
catching your seafood
Fisheries around the US are collapsing. It seems like the seafood catching industry is shedding jobs.
transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock
I believe that trucking has been reduced because of the recession which suggests that trucking jobs should decline slightly.
resurfacing the asphalt on your street
Many municipalities don't have the cash to spend on street repair.
putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road
There's a massive glut of housing stock right now. A few years ago, everyone and their brother was working in construction, building crappy third rate homes with substandard quality and chinese drywall. But then the housing bubble burst and guess what? Most of those sheetrock hackers were tossed out of work.
assembling your cars
There are actually very few jobs in automotive manufacturing in the US. This sector has been heavily mechanized. Have you seen the financial shape the automotive industry is in? It is heading for a major consolidation. And people aren't buying cars at the rate they once did since they don't have disposable income. This sector is likely to be shedding high wage jobs, not gaining them.
Yes but someone might invent a labour saving device that makes it easier to pave roads. This is what has happened with farms. The paved roads are not as important to humanity as food. Food is the most important thing to humanity, that doesn't mean going into agriculture is a good idea.
I am in this targeted demographic, and I would have to say - categorically - that most of my friends have failed to grow up.
Why would I use such a harsh word like failed? Its not the world, economic, and social differences from the age of our parents that causes them to "fail" in my book for growing up - it is purely based on the fact that they think they have. It is the generational arrogance.
Almost every single one of my friends that I know from high school or college still live with their parents, have been working in the same job since they were 18, spend their money on depreciating assets, and think they have somehow made it just because they have a 4 year degree that their parents paid for.
Getting a steady paycheck and blowing it on crap, not paying your own rent, health insurance, or groceries does not mean you are an adult. Throw in a healthy dose of entitlement vaporware accomplishment and you get a lot of strong-headed 20-somethings that couldn't recognize good advice if it was painted on their heads with neon lights.
There is nothing about getting a degree and holding down a job where you manage not to get fired for 18 months means that you are an adult. Try "thinking outside of yourself," "thinking about the future," "managing your time, money, and emotions wisely," and almost invariably "stop thinking you have everything figured out when you're 23." Blink 182 was right - no one likes you.
I was lucky enough to have my mom pay for all of my college, but I have since moved across the country, have been completely supporting myself financially for 2 years, and I'm closing on a house next month. I concentrate to realize I don't know everything (in fact I train myself to say I know almost nothing considering my age and life experience). If I can do it - I think the rest of my generation can. But they are privileged, lazy, entitled, and enabled by their parents. Its America's attitude that has caused this, not what has "happened" to America or our socio-political situation as a whole.
I refuse to accept external attribution as a reason for immaturity and a failure to grow up.
If we're living longer, so much so that they're considering pushing back social security eligibility; then doesn't it make sense to prolong what most people consider the better part of their lives?
What about all the aging boomers in their 50-60's who still think they're 29. Even the term "cougar" has become popular enough to make mainstream culture.
First, respect for the submitter for putting quotes in the headline, as neither marriage nor children is a good sign of maturity. A teenage mother who wed her babyfather isn't mature, but she would count as a an adult in this case, whereas an atheistic phd student wouldn't.
Does anybody have an actual and useful meassure of maturity?
When I read articles like this I always think about the concept of neoteny.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny
I read about this in The Naked Ape years ago. The idea is that neoteny can be a mechanism by which physical evolution takes place. I have wondered if it could also apply to societies and cultures.
The only other place I head of neoteny was in a talk I downloaded where Bruce Eckel and another programmer were bashing the concept saying that it led managers to treat experienced developers like junior coders and demand more and more work for fixed pay.
Richard Dawkins, in (iirc) The Selfish Gene proposed that if we really wanted to increase the average lifespan of humans beyond what it is now (we're on the high side of longevity compared to even other primates) then the way to do it would be if people were only allowed have children progressively later in life with each generation. It may be that we're doing this on our own naturally. I myself am the product of several generations who had children late in life, and it does seem like people in my family age more slowly.
I would also have to agree with this article. I am 22 and will be getting married in 6 months, however none of my friends from college or high school are making similar choices. While our family and friends have been supportive our decision to "marry early" as it were, others have been confused. Particularly late 20's and early 30's co-workers are put off by the idea, recommending not getting married until much later. I will note most of these individuals have never married, and seem to avoid long term relationships. So yes, this generation does seem to be avoiding/delaying marriage.
Many of the people I knew who married at 22 made bad marital choices. At least in the eyes of their family and friends. I say that because they tended to marry before they had established careers and before they had really lived independently after school. Even if you think that modern society forces people to postpone adulthood for too long, it does not necessarily follow that early marriages will benefit people on average. After all, if adulthood is delayed, then immature people will tend to make bad choices regarding future mates.
I married in my late 20s. I have not avoided long term relationships.
It's true, with the job market in the toilet for the last decade, a public school system that encourages all its students to go to college, and a student loan industry that has allied with the federal government to drive up tuition and milk students and their families for all they're worth (to say nothing of predatory credit card lending), and with the resulting massive debt young people take on in starting their lives these days unparalleled in US history, yes people are tending to put off things like marriage, children, etc. Don't let that stop you from publishing a ridiculous and haughty article about 'kids these days' though, New York Times. I'd expect nothing less.
I was lucky enough to avoid the worst of most of this stuff, but I'm not about to use that luck as a rhetorical device against my peers, some of whom made decisions that certainly would have seemed correct to anyone at the time, or who were simply misled by overzealous school counselors, or whatever. Just sayin'.
I think hidden biological mechanisms related to overpopulation have kicked in. Perhaps, subconsciously, when we see a lot more really old people living around, something switches on suggesting that reproduction can wait. Maybe informational explosion make us wait longer to acquire necessary amount of knowledge, necessary for decent life.
Also, stupid TV and internet entertainment, combined with lack of opportunity in USA contributes to this problem. ...
Every time I switch on American TV, I want to throw up.
> I think hidden biological mechanisms related to overpopulation have kicked in.
I think that is assigning way too much determinism to the process. A far simpler explanation is that people are fundamentally much less "adult" than they have been forced to be in the past.
