Opinion
Are the Millennials the new GI
Generation?
Like
their great-grandparents, they're
entering the workplace at a time of
economic crisis. And they're
demonstrating remarkable resilience
and optimism.
By Morley Winograd and Michael D.
Hais
It's a daunting time to be entering
the workplace. Today's young adults
-- like their great-grandparents
eight decades earlier -- are
graduating from high school and
college and starting careers at a
time when the American economy is
shedding jobs at a record pace.
This newest adult generation, dubbed
the Millennials, is known for its
optimism and sense of personal
confidence. But will those traits
survive the new economic realities?
Recent survey results suggest the
answer is a resounding yes.
Millennials are demonstrating
remarkable resilience in the face of
an economic crisis, even though the
downturn has affected them
disproportionately.
Through the first quarter of 2009,
employment for 16- to 24-year-olds
dropped by 5%, the largest decline
for any age cohort surveyed by
Merrill Lynch. This produced the
lowest employment rates for young
people in nearly 40 years. And the
situation isn't likely to get better
soon. A survey by the National Assn.
of Colleges and Employers found that
employers plan to hire 22% fewer
graduates this spring than last, and
that, so far, less than 20% of 2009
graduates who applied for a job have
one.
But
Millennials have adopted a number of
coping strategies to help them
weather the economic maelstrom. An
AP-mtvU poll found that nearly one
in five undergraduates have decided
to prolong their education, hoping
the storm will pass. Others have
enthusiastically turned to the
government and nonprofit sectors to
fulfill their generation's desire to
serve. Teach for America, which
places new graduates in low-income
schools, saw a 42% increase in
applications over 2008. And the
recent enactment of the Edward M.
Kennedy Serve America Act will allow
many more Millennials to serve at
home or abroad while also providing
Pell Grant-level support for their
future education.
One
thing Millennials are not doing is
losing confidence in themselves or
their government. A recent survey by
the Pew Research Center for People &
the Press found that 56% of
Millennials were fairly satisfied
with the way things were going for
them financially, a significantly
greater degree of optimism than
aging baby boomers expressed in the
same survey (46%). Two-thirds of
Millennials told Pew survey
researchers that they approved of
the way President Obama was handling
the economy, with only 5% saying his
economic policies have made things
worse. And although 32% of
undergraduates at four-year colleges
told Edison Media Research that
financial worries have increased the
stress they're under, 75% of
Millennials expressed confidence
that Obama was doing the right
things to fix the economy.
This
type of relentless optimism and
faith in collective action in the
face of hardship is typical of civic
generations such as the Millennials.
And judging by history, their
attitudes will serve them well.
Their great-grandparents, the GI
Generation, learned to make do with
less as they entered adulthood in
the 1930s and then went on to defeat
fascism in World War II and build
the strongest economy the world has
known. As young Millennials absorb
the lessons of America's greatest
economic downturn since the 1930s,
their determination to succeed, like
that of the GI Generation before
them, will be the source of the
economic rejuvenation that in all
likelihood will accompany their full
entry into America's economic life.
Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais
are fellows at the NDN think tank
and the New Policy Institute and are
the coauthors of "Millennial
Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the
Future of American Politics."
