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The World Socialist Web Site, publication of record of the ICFI (SEP), on May 24th released a report about the grim situation many millennials face:
The stock market is booming, and President Donald Trump is boasting at every turn that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in five decades.
However, the working class, the vast majority of the population, is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological crisis. The same processes that have produced vast sums of wealth for the ruling elite have left millions of workers on the brink of existence.
Perhaps no segment of the population reflects the devastating consequences of these processes so starkly as the generation of young people deemed the "millennials," those born roughly between the years 1981 and 1996. More than half the 72 million American millennials are now in their 30s, with the oldest turning 38 this year.
A recent exposé by the Wall Street Journal noted that millennials are "in worse financial shape than prior living generations and may not recover." The article, "Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis," [paywalled] concludes by stating that people born in the 1980s are at risk of becoming "America's Lost generation."
Selected bullet points from the WSWS article:
- Millennials have taken on 300 percent more student debt than their parents' generation. [Source: The College Board, Trends in Student Aid 2013]
- By 2014, 48 percent of workers with bachelor's degrees are employed in jobs for which they're overqualified. [Source: Labor Economist Stephen Rose, published by Urban Institute.]
- The number of workers in the United States participating in the gig economy is expected to triple to 42 million workers by 2020, and 42 percent of those people are likely to be millennials. [Source: Freshbooks]
- Between 1978 and 2017, according to the EPI, CEO compensation rose in the US by 1,070 percent, while the typical worker's compensation over these 39 years rose by a mere 11.2 percent.
- In the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes. [Source: Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.]
- One in 5 millennials say they cannot afford routine healthcare expenses. Many of these millennials are uninsured because of the cost. An additional 26 percent say they can afford routine health-care costs, but only with difficulty. [Source: Harris Poll]
- Men and women in their thirties are marrying at rates below every other generation on record. [Source: The Atlantic, "The Death (and Life) of Marriage in America"]
- It is predicted that most millennials will not be able to retire until age 75. [Source: NerdWallet analysis of federal data]
The report concludes, "Far from becoming the 'Lost Generation' predicted by the Wall Street Journal, this generation of workers carries within it an enormous source of revolutionary potential."
[Ed. Note. I debated whether or not to run this story given the partisan source for the article, but the list of references suggested it was more than a simple opinion piece. So, are things really as grim as portrayed here? I'm too old to be a millennial, but have both personally experienced as well as witnessed many others facing the same trends listed here. Where do things go from here?]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 27 2019, @11:58PM (3 children)
No, it did not. It is just now getting close to a single digit participation percentage spread. Social changes don't happen overnight.
No, it did not. Well over half of my highschool class did not even try to attend college around twenty-five years ago. That is not the case now. Tuition prices should take care of that soon enough though unless we keep shoveling tax money and loans at useless degrees.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:37AM (2 children)
Most new degrees are useless to the point of having become a running joke [smbc-comics.com]. The universities everywhere have become administrative laden, top heavy, inefficient beasts. The funding models emphasize throughput rather than quality. In Europe, since the Bologne Process, the idea was to "harmonize" the levels of teaching. The result was a dumbing down across the nations to the lowest available standard. The basic degrees now cover about 40% of the material they used to prior to that agreement. Any faculty member skilled in teaching or research is pushed aside or flat out fired in favor of those who can and do concentrate on climbing the corporate bureaucracy ladder that the universities have become: some institutions now spend over 70% of their budgets on overhead not related to either research or teaching. The cycle has gone on long enough that the ignorant, uneducated students this broken system produced are coming back into the system as faculty members and driving everything down another notch. You can still learn these days, but you are mostly on your own. It is getting almost impossible to do that in the context of getting a degree.
A concrete turning point was the Bologne Process. However that is a regional problem. Globally, the business community's LARP has spread throughout all of society. Such that there seems to be a universal derision for knowledge and skill which has spread even to institutions of higher learning.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @05:22AM
A large part of that top-heavy administrative structure happens to be social engineering SJW types. It takes literally hundreds of personnel at larger universities to ensure that the university is in compliance with all the nonsense rules.
1. Do we have enough transgender?
2. Do we have enough gays?
3. Do we have enough women?
4. Do we have enough transectionists?
5. Do we have enough minorities?
6. Are we persecuting traditionalist/conservative people?
7. Are we undermining authority?
8. How can we make normal white heterosexual males more miserable?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @10:52AM
This is a great reason to intentionally default and never pay your student loans. (like me)
Added benefit is the end of state capitalism, and the suicidal panic of people who never worked a day in their lives yet collect percentages off of people who do.
Who needs a system where the ones at the bottom get starved for not working while the ones at the top are rewarded for not working?
Without ideological consistency, there is literally no point to even having intelligence, as inconsistent ideologies are as deadly as ignorance.
I refuse to be ruled by the Don Jr's Jr's of the world(which includes don jr's 'i started with a small loan of a million dollars and lost it all then asked for another') and you should too.
I refuse to be ruled in general, but I especially refuse to be ruled by inherited wealth. (This is in The Republic, I'm not alone in this)
This obvious logic, I suspect, is the actual reasoning behind what we know as 'The War on Terror.'