Millennials Pass On the News

The Millennial Generation is a mighty voting bloc this year, and it's clear that we're doing things differently. Yesterday's article, Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On (New York Times), talks about some fascinating numbers about how we get information about the presidential candidates:

Senator Barack Obama’s videotaped response to President Bush’s final State of the Union address — almost five minutes of Mr. Obama’s talking directly to the camera — elicited little attention from newspaper and television reporters in January. But on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire. Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social networking sites like Facebook.

Just like the article describes, I made most of my decisions about whom to support (Obama!) by watching YouTube videos of speeches and debates (and yeah, that corny Will.I.Am. video). I also read articles, speech transcripts, personal rants and raves, etc., that get sent my way from friends via email. I never read printed daily papers or watch television news (ugh) - I only noticed this article because it was on the front page of my city's paper in a newspaper machine on the street.

Millennials are BFFs

Here's an article, Generation Y Friends (msnbc.com), that describes the phenomenon of hiring groups of Millennial friends. This pretty much sounds like the best idea ever. Here's what I know about my Millennial peers: we don't have much responsibility, and we don't have a strong sense of loyalty... but our social connections are super important to us. Our K-12 educations and extracurricular activities strongly emphasized teamwork, and these days it's normal for a Millennial to keep track of hundreds and hundreds of friends on a daily basis through Facebook.

Apparently Milllennials like wine

We're famous! This Los Angeles Times article on Millennials and wine hyperlinked the phrase "Millennial Generation" to my blog, so I figured I'd return the favor: Young Winos: The Millennial generation is a thirsty one.

(Personally, I'm quite happy not knowing the difference between a $3 bottle and a $20 one.)

Close to home?

When I was a teenager in my home-suburb, I always imagined that my twenties would take me to some other city - L.A., New York, etc. Moving away to college was a sign of privilege and a bit of glamor, and I had to swallow a whole lot of pride to put on my state school sweatshirt. But I did it to save a buck, or a hundred thousand of them, and hence I afforded the sweatshirt.

After college, I made plans to move away - several times, in fact - and came close to actually leaving. In 2005, I applied to a few dozen jobs in NYC and found a roommate. In 2006, I packed all my stuff and bought a train ticket to L.A. Way back in 2004, I filled out applications for grad schools across the country. Obviously, I was pretty serious about it - but better and/or more fun options kept coming up at home here in Seattle.

I finally took off and wandered across a few continents for eight months. My peers - privileged 20-something Millennials - often choose to leave their homes for a city far away, or at least to travel. Just look at my Facebook friends list - not even half are within 50 miles.

This week, I got to catch up with my college mentor. Graduate school is on my horizon, and I'd been thinking to pursue it at my alma mater - but he listed off a half-dozen schools in a half-dozen cities. Suddenly, I felt that old surge of excitement - there was that same glamorous life in that unfamiliar city. That same city threads through my memories of the past ten years, though I never made it there.

When I got home, I was grinning, giddy with the excitement of the future. But as I lay in bed that night, I realized something. I left my home to travel for most of a year to get to know myself - and it worked. But it wasn't about "finding myself" somewhere out in the unfamiliar world. It was about coming home and realizing what a worthy process it is to grow deep roots, to intimately know one city or town.

And, I realized that I want to go back to school because I want to learn how to help grow my community into something stronger. When I think about my contribution to the world, it certainly isn't about contributing to billions wandering around the world, always in search of something better. It's about friends and family and neighbors.

Sometimes, when I'm sitting with a friend, I imagine our heritages spidering out across the globe, back towards our ancestors' hometowns. I love diaspora and this unique diversity it lends my generation. My own family is mixed and immigrant. But having grown up straddling roots across a whole ocean, I think I'm ready to set myself down and stay close to home.

Bad News on the Millennial Generation

Just what you’ve been waiting for… the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report! This issue is the 2005 report of a document that I’ve referenced before (from a previous year) – it’s the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Department of Health and Human Services annual study of youth risk behaviors. Pretty dreary stuff.

So let’s take stock of bad things happening to the Millennial Generation. Because it’s Monday. Well, and it matters a lot.

You can read the whole study here, but if you prefer not to pore over pages of gloomy statistics, I’ve pulled out some of the gloomiest highlights:

Of the Millennials surveyed (high school students in grades 9 to 12 in 2005):

• 6.0% of U.S. youth 14-17 years old did not go to school on one or more of the previous 30 days because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to or from school
  
• 7.9% reported having been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property during this same period

Here’s a special set of stats, especially for the ladies (again, students in grades 9 to 12 in 2005):

• 10% of the females were overweight
• 61.7% of the females were trying to lose weight
• 17% of females kept from eating for at least 24 hours at a time over the past 30 days

And just to make sure you're frowning:

• 28.5% reported having felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row during the previous 12 months that they stopped doing some usual activities.
• 13% reported actually having made a plan to attempt suicide during the past 12 months

So is this a generation in crisis or what? What do we do?

In the year 2014...

By 2014, when the Millennial Generation are teenagers to age 32, “77% of new job openings in Washington State that pay enough for an individual to support a small family will be held by workers who have had education or training beyond high school. Of these jobs, more than half will be held by workers with four-year college degrees.”

That’s from a report by the College & Work Ready Agenda, which aims to close the gap between high school graduation requirements and college- and work-readiness in Washington state. You can read it here.

So what does it take to support a family? A “family wage” is enough for a family to support itself without government assistance. Two working adults with two children need a household gross income of $57,097 in King or Snohomish County (that’s the Seattle area, for our readers around the world) – that’s just for the basics, barely above what the state’s Office of Financial Management calls “economic distress.”

According to the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, 76% of our state’s high school graduates (those are the Millennials) enroll in some kind of higher education within two years of graduation. (Compared to the Baby Boomers, that’s a huge percentage – read a previous post, College and the Millennial Generation.) But, 52% (in 2005) of those students had to take at least one remedial course once they got to college, because their high school courses did not meet the college entry requirements. That means they have to pay tuition to take classes for things they should have learned in high school, without receiving college credit. And, this gap between high school graduation requirements and college entrance requirements disproportionately impacts low-income students and students of color.

What does this mean for Millennials? First, the vast majority of us have to go to college if we want to earn enough to support a family. Nearly half of us will need four-year degrees – which carries an enormous expense (read my post at Futurist.com, Future Workers and Debt), and many Millenials could use some help with that expense. Second, like I’ve written in other posts, I don’t think college is essential or better than not going to college – it’s just one of many choices in life. But let’s leave that choice up to the Millennials, not up to institutionalized opportunity gaps.

What Millennials Care About

What do 16 to 22 year olds (the core of the Millennial Generation) worry about? Find out what young Californians feel in this article at New American Media.

Here's how the study summarizes itself: "The poll reveals a deep yearning among 16- to 22-year-olds for traditional structures - marriage, parenthood [and] religion." Surprised?

Okay, and secondly, here Mirar Bristol's super fantastic blog on millennials, Generation Who? I just took the survey there, and it was totally worth the few minutes it took - very interesting. Take it here.

Millennial Generation in the Nonprofit Sector

Here is an interesting study called Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out. It surveyed about 6,000 Americans in the nonprofit "pipeline" - that is, people likely to either already be working in or be moving towards a career in the nonprofit sector - to see what they're all about. It includes a special section on those under 25 years of age. Given that the nonprofit sector will need 80,000 new senior managers each year, 40% more each year than is currently required, by 2016, this is a big career opportunity for millennials, and a big workforce issue for the U.S.

Millennial Artisans

This study "posits that there are significant parallels between artisans in pre-industrial Europe and Asia and today's entrepreneurs" - especially millennials. Read the article: A New Artisan Economy.

Generation Gap on Marriage and Parenthood

Here's a terrific Pew Research Center study (As Marriage and Parenthood Drift Apart, Public Is Concerned about Social Impact: Generation Gap in Values, Behaviors), brimming with information about attitudes about marriage, family, and more - including some statistics about generational attitudes. Here's a quote:

Younger adults attach far less moral stigma than do their elders to out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation without marriage. They engage in these behaviors at rates unprecedented in U.S. history. Nearly four-in-ten (36.8%) births in this country are to an unmarried woman. Nearly half (47%) of adults in their 30s and 40s have spent a portion of their lives in a cohabiting relationship.

...and she's back

So it's been nearly ten weeks since I last posted. Well, life intervened... you know that life events scale, where you add up all the stressful events that have happened to you in the past year? Let's just say that over the past couple of months, if the object of the game was the get as many points as possible, then I win!

But now I'm back on my feet and I still have plenty to say about my generation. A couple of days ago I also celebrated the start of the 75-year countown to my 100th birthday... this Millennial is officially in her mid-twenties.

Does it mean anything to be 25? I'm noticing that some of my Millennial friends actually have good real jobs and maybe even serious relationships... for example, I recently happily agreed to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of a close friend, my first taste of what'll probably be a long, wedding-filled stretch of my life. What's next, job loyalty?!

Who knows if, as a generation, Millennials will continue to be adventurous, impatient, and generally noncommitted... or if we really will start to settle down. As for me, I recently started working for an organization that I actually want to stick with for the long haul. Strange but true!

Future Workers and Debt (published at Futurist.com)

Today, the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer read, “U.S. college students buried under debt.”

Are today’s young people just buying iPods and designer flip-flops instead of saving their cash for school? Are they too busy drinking five-dollar microbrews to get part-time jobs to pay for tuition? Let’s look at the numbers . . .

When I started my Bachelor’s degree at the University of Washington on October 1, 2001, exactly six years ago, my quarterly tuition was $1,197 per quarter for state residents like me and $4,289 for non-residents. When I graduated in June 2005, my final quarter’s tuition was $1,762 - a 47% increase in just four years. (My non-resident classmates paid $5,972, a hefty 28% increase.)

This fall quarter, residents pay $2,129 and non-residents pay $7,377, nearly double what I paid just six years ago. Keep in mind that most students enroll in three quarters per year, September through June, making the yearly tuition rates $6,387 and $22,131, respectively. That’s just tuition - room, board, books, and fees are extra.

As if that’s not enough of a burden, a few days ago I read about the rising cost of rental housing in the Seattle P-I. When I moved out on my own six years ago, the average Seattle apartment cost just over $800. These days, the average is $1,001, a 25% increase.

Think today’s young people are lazy? Try succeeding in full-time college classes (a 30- to 40-hour per week endeavour including study time) while working for an extra $22,131 for tuition. Say you worked full-time at an $11 per hour entry-level job, which is well above minimum wage, on top of going to the U.W. as a non-resident. After paying tuition, at the end of the month, you’d have about 62 bucks leftover to pay for books, school fees, taxes, rent, groceries, maybe even a little medical insurance - and of course, an iPod. (Hey, at least the U.W. provides cheap bus passes.)

When I worked as a college counselor, I met many young students who were attempting to do just that. Working 20 to 40 hours per week on top of school is no easy task. Grades slip, and students struggle to enjoy college. Students rush from class to work and back to class, exhausted and too tired to study or have fun at the end of the day. Lots of students live at home with their parents, missing out on that first taste of independence that college should offer. Unfortunately, many young adults must rely on cars to commute to their jobs - adding another huge expense, with auto loan payments, fuel costs, repairs, and insurance, which is typically more expensive for young adults than for older people.

The moral of the story? Even with all this struggle and a bit of grant money, most students still need to take on debt to make ends meet.

So it’s official. Debt levels for the Millennial Generation (those born since 1982) are totally out of control. Before many Millennials even reach the age of 25, they’ve racked up enough debt to equal all their income for the next five or ten years, and it will take nearly a lifetime to pay off. So much for going to college to get ahead.

P.S. The Federal deficit is close to $9 trillion, or $30,000 per person - of course, that’s a bill that will be forwarded to Millennials.

Generation I.O.U.

If you've got a half-hour and some knitting to catch up on, listen to Generation I.O.U., the economics of the young, a program that ran last fall on NPR.

It even has some great tips on how to save money so you can afford to pay back student loans . . . like calling the 1-800 numbers on laundry detergent containers, and wooing them into sending you a year's supply of detergent. Or, arriving at garage sales at closing time to get that ten-dollar sofa for free.

On the subject, today I also blogged at Futurist.com about the debt levels that overwhelm the Millennial Generation.

Mixed Millennials

Is the Millennial Generation really that different from everyone else? Sometimes I crave a dose of cold, hard numbers.

So, since it's Fact-tastic Friday, let's take a trip to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 1970, 460,000 children in the U.S. were living in mixed-race families. Those are the second half of the Baby Boomers (ages 10 to 18) and first half of Generation X (infants to age 9).

In 1980, that number more than doubled to just short of 1 million. Those were all the Generation X kids.

By 1990, the number nearly doubled again to 1.9 million. Now we're talking Millennials up to age 8, and Generation X age 9 to 18.

With the 2000 Census, we got the first batch of good, solid data on mixed-race people in the U.S. That was the first year that Americans could check more than one "race" box on the census. It turns out that 4% of those under 18 had two or more boxes checked, compared to only 1.9% of those 18 and older. (Of the total population, 2.4% had two or more boxes checked.) It also found that 6% of all married couples and 10-12% of unmarried couples living together were interracial.

Today, we're getting close to 2010 - when the first Millennials will turn 28, right around the U.S. average age of marriage. What will Millennial marriages look like? What will the Millennials' children look like? There are some brand new faces around the U.S. - how will they change our world?

Helicopter Parents: Still Hovering Over Millennials

When we talk about Millennials, we should also talk about the Baby Boomers. They're the ones who raised Millennials, after all, and they're the ones who created the world in which Millennials grew up.

Now that nearly half of all Millennials are adults (ages 18 to 25), parental influence isn't quite as important, right? Well . . .

Six months ago, Merrill Lynch held a parent's day for parents of new hires so they could see the office and hear more about the company their child will be working for. It was a pilot program, done only with minority candidates. "There needs to be some letting go, but that's not for us to decide," says Selena Morris, a Merrill Lynch spokeswoman. "There are psychologists for that."
Source: Are Parents Killing Their Kids' Careers? (Forbes.com)

Referring to college students, a self-proclaimed Helicopter Parent declares in USA Today:

These students are the product of 18 years of parents' dedication and sacrifice. To expect a sudden relinquishment of this responsibility to an educational entity is naive at best.

(Maybe it's just me - but I figure the sudden relinquishment of responsibility should be to the young adults themselves, not the educational entity.)

What's with these parents of the Millennial Generation? A few factors:

• When Baby Boomers started having babies in the early 1980s, childrearing was as trendy as parachute pants. Hence the "Baby On Board" signs, etc. When the babies grew into 8-year-olds, Baby Boomers became Soccer Moms. And now that the 8-year-olds are real, live adults, they've easily transitioned into Helicopter Parents.
• The first Millennials came of age right around September 11th (read The Millennial Generation Grows Up, 9/11/07). Nothing like several years of war to make parents nervous and protective.
• Baby Boomers spent a lot of money on their Millennial kids' college educations, much more than with previous generations. And they want that investment to turn out.
• Millennials have generally gotten along pretty well with their parents. Statistically, Millennials actually respect and like their parents. When Millennials need advice or money they're pretty quick to turn to the Boomers - and often their needs are met instantly through cell phones and email.
• Baby Boomers are competitive about everything - they had to be, because there are so many of them. Just as many Boomers worked overtime to get those promotions at work, naturally they worked overtime as parents to get the best for their kids.

How will Boomer parents and Millennial adults continue to interact over the next fifty years? What happens when Boomers become grandparents? What happens when Boomers are in their 80s, 90s, and 100s, and Millennials are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s?

I have a feeling this relationship isn't just an eighteen-year fling.

Read more in a press release put out yesterday: The Future of Helicopter Parenting (Social Technologies).

Diversity and Millennials

As a blogger for Futurist.com, yesterday I posted an article on the booming diversity of the Eastside of Seattle. Especially if you're from around here, check it out - the statistics will knock the socks off all your preconceptions about the Eastside (provided your preconceptions wear socks).

Booming diversity is what the Millennial Generation is all about. We're the changing faces of this nation. There are thousands of "Eastsides" all over the U.S.

Now that's exciting!

Booming Diversity in the Northwest (published at Futurist.com)

This Tuesday, I attended a panel luncheon called “The Eastside’s Booming Diversity: Cultivating a Connected Community,” presented by Leadership Eastside.

The “Eastside” refers to the east side of Lake Washington (Seattle is on the west side of the lake). In addition to Futurist.com’s hometown of Kirkland, the Eastside includes 23 towns, and has a population roughly the same as Seattle. And it’s growing. Drive down I-405 through Bellevue, the Eastside’s biggest city, and you’ll see a couple dozen cranes raising several sky-scraper skeletons.

Alongside its structural growth spurt, the Eastside is experiencing a surge of diversity. The Eastside has long had the reputation of being the wealthy, white suburb of Seattle. It’s home to Bill Gates and Paul Allen, for one thing, and the corporate campuses of Nintendo, Microsoft, and Google. That doesn’t exactly bring to mind a colorful urban center like Seattle – more like sprawling McMansions and wealthy white people.

But from 2000 to 2006, the white population of the Eastside increased just 3% - while the Hispanic population increased 36%, African Americans 13%, and Asian Americans 33%. A full one in three Bellevue residents was born outside the U.S. Of course, within broad categories like “Asian American,” there is even greater diversity - including people of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino cultural and linguistic heritage.

Huge percentages of students in classrooms are English language learners (up to a third at some schools), and speak different languages in their homes (27% in Bellevue). Many Eastside schools have a white minority, and a majority of students of color.

They are also facing significant income disparities associated with race. African American Eastsiders make 30% below the median income of the Eastside, and Hispanic Eastsiders make 37% less the than the median.

What to do about all the challenges associated with diversity? The panel focused on two key points.

The first point was about creating structural mechanisms and processes that accommodate diversity. Panelist Lourdes Salazar offered a simple example. Flyers in English are an ineffective way to reach Spanish-speaking parents of students. But an invitation in Spanish to a “cafecito” (a cup of coffee) at their children’s school is a good way to connect with these parents and to help their children succeed. She noted that when they first tried this tactic at a local school, forty parents showed up for a cafecito at seven in the morning. The idea is to make simple investments so that public announcements, events, and signs make cultural sense for all different people.

The second point was about creating safe, comfortable gathering places for diverse populations to interact in positive, respectful ways. Panelists Eddie Pate from Starbucks and Ron Sher, a developer, emphasized spaces like coffee shops and shopping centers as integral to fostering healthy diversity. People have work places and home places, and Mr. Sher pointed out the need for a “third place” – a space for people to gather and be with one another. Mr. Sher talked about the Eastside shopping center , which offers chess boards and seating to allow the community to gather while de-emphasizing consumption. It also financially supports celebrations of diversity like an annual multicultural holiday parade.

Of course, the Eastside needs to invest in more complex measures to keep their newfound diversity healthy – like affordable housing, education for English language learners, voter education, etc.

But perhaps the biggest - and simplest - step towards creating healthy diversity is a paradigm shift that starts with conversation like this one. The Eastside’s diversity boom represents the future of the U.S., and it’s time to be aware of it. These conversations truly do make a difference in the health of a region’s diversity.

Read more about this event in The Seattle Times.

Millennial Dwellings

As a researcher for Futurist.com, I've been exploring the fascinating future of housing. Check out Glen Hiemstra's blog post on the topic at Futurist.com, where you can also link to a videorecording of his keynote address to the Housing Washington 2007: 14th Annual Affordable Housing Conference.

Very commonly, American adult Millennials are living with their parents - to the extent that "Boomerang Generation" has become another word for the cohort of the oldest Millennials and youngest Gen Xers. (Although, for a quick read on why the Boomerang phenomenon is mostly hype, read this article.) And many other Millennials, of course, are writing checks to their landlords.

I'm a Seattle Millennial, so the prospect of home ownership is kind of a laugh (or cry) for most of my local peers... the Housing Affordability Index shows that the average Seattle household has only 66% of the income they need to purchase the average Seattle home. And the numbers for younger first-time home-buyers (such as Millennials) are obviously lower.

We're still young. But over the next decade, Millennials will start entering the housing market en masse. In light of the current mortgage crisis, will Millennials buy homes? How? What kind of homes? In cities? Suburbs? Rural areas?

And then there's the issue of sustainability, which links very closely with housing.

The average U.S. home has jumped from 980 square feet in 1950 to 2,300 square feet today. (For an outstanding take on this trend, check out Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class by Robert H. Frank.) This is not sustainable, and Millennial homebuyers will need different choices. What are some cool alternatives to the Boomers' suburban McMansions?

• One choice is multi-family housing like condos and multiplexes, a possible staple for this largely urban generation.
  
• Another is "green" developments, with sustainable building features and good walkability.


• A third option - my favorite - are resource-skinny "tiny houses." These are extreme, but even a modest downsize to 1950 home sizes would do wonders for sustainability as more Millennials purchase homes. At least, they're good inspiration to downsize in the coming years.

Just for fun, take a tour of how a very small number of Millennials are living . . . in luxury dorms.

College and the Millennial Generation

Classes are officially in full swing at most colleges.

As a former college counselor, I know that plenty of Millennials go to college just because their parents and teachers told them to, and never even considered forgoing the degree. In fact, after college, plenty of those students go on to get graduate degrees for the same reason (or lack thereof). Plus, for many professions, a college degree is the normal prerequisite now. It's a given.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that of the class of 2003, 72.3% of public school graduates and 92.8% of private school graduates continued on to college that same year.
For contrast, let's take a look at 1963, when the first Baby Boomers were finishing high school. Back then, 39% of young women and 52.3% of young men who graduated high school went to college that same year.

Given the enormous price tag of college, is this a good thing? Are too many Millennials pursuing a college degree at the expense of experiences that would have suited them better (like jumping right into their careers, or traveling the world, or whatever)? Are Millennials going to pricey colleges to finally get a good education - perhaps after a less-than-satisfying high school education?

The Millennial Generation Grows Up

Six years ago, the first several million Millennials were 18 and 19 years old. We packed up our brand new high school diplomas and moved into our first apartments or dorm rooms. We started our first full-time jobs or went to our first college classes. It was time to grow up.

First-day-of-school jitters and scraping together our first rent checks should have marked our coming of age. But, instead, we were ushered into adulthood just as Americans were swept into violent conflict on September 11, 2001. For six years now, we've been grown-ups - and for six years, the U.S. has been in a state of war, violence, and political turmoil.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of Millennials signed up for the armed services, and thousands have died or have been seriously injured in combat. Many Millennial families struggle to start their adult lives with new spouses deployed abroad, or as they are deployed themselves.

Mostly due to the war, the U.S. national debt has sharply increased in recent years, and currently stands at over nine trillion dollars, or almost $30,000 per American. (Guess who will be paying those bills?)

This is the only adulthood Millennials have ever known. We sure could use some peace.

What Color is Your Collar?

Over the weekend, my Baby Boomer dad asked me about blue collar Millennials. What are their perspectives and experiences? Do they fit in with the world-wandering, career-changing Millennials?

It's a great question. Interestingly, a full one in five adult Millennials currently work in the service industry - restaurant staff, nannies, tutors, valets, movers, secretaries, personal assistants, retail staff, and gardeners. (In fact, I can check several off that list all by myself.) But few Millennials are sporting blue collars these days.

Last week, an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer explains this trend. Here's a quote:

Carlos Tostado, 49, the Snohomish PUD's training coordinator, calls the shortage of skilled workers a generational issue. "We wanted our kids to do better," he said. "We thought college was the answer and we pushed for that. We did too good of a job of that. Skilled labor was thought of as too much work."

It turns out that as skilled laborers age, there is a severe shortage of Millennial blue collar workers. Many fewer Millennials are choosing blue collars - often at rates less than half of the older generations.

For Baby Boomers' parents - the Silent and G.I. Generations - blue collar jobs were the norm. Baby Boomers, similarly, had to compete with each other for jobs, so plenty of them opted for skilled trades.

Since then, economic and cultural changes have made our generation different. High school teachers mention vocational schools in passing, but they're marketed to a small minority. In my high school district, vocational-prep classes like auto shop took place at a totally different campus.

Have we short-changed millions of talented Millennials by forcing them into white collar professions? Have we turned potentially happy, healthy would-be electricians into overworked, depressed software engineers?

If so, why? Many blue collar professions offer great wages (with entry-level pay often better than entry-level white collar pay). They are important, challenging, rewarding careers. But our society seems to have cut off that option to most Millennials.

Of course, some Millennials do choose blue collar careers. I hope you'll read or listen to NPR's Opting Out of College for a Blue-Collar Life by Tovia Smith. It's telling that this piece is one in a seven-part series - and all of the other six parts are about the new standard: college.

There are many fascinating trends on the topic of collar colors. Read on . . .

• Pink-collar workers fight to leave "ghetto" (Seattle Times)
• Green collar jobs for urban America (Van Jones and Ben Wyskida for Yes! Magazine)
• New 'gold-collar' young workers gain clout (USA Today)

Small Dreams

Summer vacation is officially over. Bummer.

But millions of Millennials spent their Labor Day with just a twinge of excitement... to be ruling the hallways as the new seniors, class of 2008.

Many of these seniors will be applying to college in the coming months. Yesterday on NPR's Marketplace, I heard "Small dreams for college-bound students," a segment on how college threatens to become increasingly divided: two-year colleges for low-income people, and four-year colleges for middle- and high-income people. Take a listen here.

Millennials' Mental Health

According to a 2005 study published in the Annals of Family Medicine, 25% of adults experienced depression before the age of 24, the highest of any adult age-group.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that in 2003, 27.4% of twelfth-graders "felt so sad/hopeless almost every day for the past 2+ weeks that stopped usual activities." And a startling 6.1% had attempted suicide in the past 12 months (with 1/3 of these requiring medical attention for a suicide attempt).

As a generation, Millennials are in crisis. We've been raised to be more successful and capable than any other generation, but it's not making us happy. This is a serious endemic and we need to pay attention.

Retaining Short Attention Spans

When it comes to jobs, Millennials have really, really short attention spans.

You'd expect frequent career change from those of us with weird, interdisciplinary college majors who want to go into graphic design one week and law school the next . . . you know, those of us without career tracks yet.

But okay, what if you have a computer science degree and you're making double your parents' combined income at Google? Or you're paying off the equivalent of a Seattle mortgage for your master's in public policy? You'll stick with your career track for at least a few years, right?

Admittedly, I have a lot of friends in that first category, so I started seeking out Millennials in the second category. Here's what I heard.

• A well-to-do 23-year-old aviation engineer is saving up so that he can quit and run off to South America... after eight months on the job.
• Two friends with cubicle gigs (one in distribution and another in telecommunications), both with outstanding pay and benefits, are burned out and plan to quit, within twelve months of being hired.
• One 24-year-old at Google loves working there, but also received some significant cash to travel around the world. A big rent check? Or a backpack and a bus ticket? He chose the latter.

As for me, I got my dream job after college - as an academic counselor - and hey, it was really fun and rewarding. But frittering away my savings on a long road trip around the U.S. sounded like way more fun than job security and health insurance.

This all sounds like a grand old time, but the truth is that many Millennials are feeling lost (hence the wandering?). As I observe my own social network, I come to this philosophical conclusion: many of us have access to pretty much anything we want, but that doesn't mean we'll come out happy. We're the first generation with plenty of time, and plenty of credit. (Now there's a "debtly" combination. Sorry.)

We're realizing early on that "everything we want" - marriage, family, a good job, comfortable finances - doesn't come with a warranty. We watched our parents get divorced and laid off, so we're not exactly starry-eyed about adult commitments, and don't see many good reasons to stick around.

Plus, while we readily indulge in around-the-world adventures, we're inundated by images of war, corrupt politics, a sick Earth, and distant family and friends. Frequent travel and jobs abroad are popular among my friends - always on to the newer and wilder thing - but the adventures are often accompanied by loneliness, disconnect, and disappointment, which often worsens upon returning.

For a long time, I've stated that the way to retain Millennials at work was to give them variety and excitement at work. I've encouraged employers to offer business travel, new learning opportunities, transfers to different jobs within a company, transfers to new cities, that kind of thing. Basically, I've been saying, employers should simulate the frequent job change and adventures that Millennials create for themselves.

But maybe the real answer to retaining Millennial employees is to help them find connection and fulfillment in their lives.

• Offer outstanding mental health benefits.
• Foster close social networks at work.
• Create low-cost benefits like support groups.
• Connect Millennials with supportive mentors.
• Provide flexible scheduling options.
• Be generous with vacation days.
• Teach Millennials to make the most of their work-life balance.
• Oh, and please, give Millennials some financial counseling or debt relief.

While we'll probably retain our wanderlust to some extent, we could definitely use some good, old-fashioned friendship, caring, and support.

Young Millennial Parents

College-educated and affluent Millennials are delaying childbearing the longest. Lower-income young Millennial adults are having kids later than their parents, but the average age of first childbirth (for women) is still around 27. That means a large number of Millennials are already parents, and many have been so since their teen years.

There are vast financial rewards for being childless through college and through the first decade of a career. Flexible work schedules, part-time workers, telecommuters, new parents returning to work after parental leave or time off, and parents entering or re-entering the workforce later in life are great options on paper, but these valuable members of society are often left behind as their childless, overtiming peers get promoted.

This means that while low-income Millennials have kids early, making it harder to rise the economic ranks, high-income Millennials have kids later, making it easier to rise the economic ranks. The cycle fulfills itself.

Isn't it time to stop penalizing young adults for having families? Later childbearing is a wonderful new option for Millennial adults, but it shouldn't be the only option for Millennials who want financially successful careers, too. Let's make alternative work options a good, viable option in practice - not just on paper.

That Magical Millennial Decade

Imagine this. You're living your life, time is passing by . . . and suddenly, an extra ten years pops up in front of you. That's right, everything you were going to do tomorrow - well, save it for ten years and a day later. You've got a whole decade and you can do anything you want with it. What would you do?

It sounds like a wild sci-fi fantasy, but it's the question facing millions of Millennials. How is this possible?

Just a few decades ago, young adults under age 25 (that's how old Millennials are today) were already married with a kid or two. Plus, people pretty much stuck to their careers back then - if they were entry-level teachers at age 24, they would be retiring teachers at age 65. By the time they were 25, adult life was pretty much figured out.

Fast forward to today. College-educated folks are getting married near their thirtieth birthday and having kids a few years later. That means the relatively affluent sector of Millennials - the eldest of whom are finished with college - have a whole lot of time before they bear any semblance of responsibility.

They've got a decade to wander, to play, to work, to go back to school . . . what will they do?

This is not a scientific study, of course, but I did some reflecting on what my peers have done in the past year or two. Here's a short list: nannying on the French/Swiss border; working at a lead-free pottery studio in Oaxaca, Mexico; teaching English in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Japan, and South Korea; learning first-hand about percussion in Cuba and Brazil; going on a road trip down the East coast of Africa (Cairo to Cape Town); checking out the gay community in Havana, Cuba; bicycling across China and southeast Asia; returning to a family farm in Bolivia for a year, having lived on the same farm a few years back; working an office job in Rome, Italy; working an office job in Amman, Jordan; being a teaching assistant in Iceland; and, of course, wandering around the world with no stated purpose.

Most of those aforementioned wanderers are women, too - a contrast from even the adventure-inclined Boomers. If you're a Millennial, what are you doing before you settle down? If you're older, what would you do with this new, wide-open decade?

Millennials: Young and Female

I've been talking with Millennial men and women lately, asking them to compare their lives to their parents' lives at their age. The responses have been fascinating - with an unexpected twist.

My dad was 24 (my age) in 1971. He had recently finished college and was wandering the world with a backpack, approaching the job market like a salad bar, and looking for adventure. That is exactly, to the letter, what I've been doing lately. Other Millennials report that their fathers were starting graduate school, starting families, starting careers, etc. Sure, things were different, but not so different from our lives today.

But our mothers' lives were very different. Our mothers' parents discouraged them from attending college, just because they were women. When they did go to college, would-be doctors became nurses instead - not because they preferred nursing, but because they didn't have a choice. When their limited contraceptive options failed, they started raising babies or had risky pre-Roe v. Wade abortions.

Our future daughters will be our age around 2035. How will they compare their lives to ours? Will they be paid $1.00 to every $1.00 their male peers are paid, rather than the $0.76 we receive today? Will they still be forced to see women as sexual objects on billboards, television, and the internet? In our daughters' households, will they still do the vast majority of the world's unpaid labor, like childrearing and housework, or will men share that burden? Will one in every three of our daughters be sexually or physically assaulted during their lifetimes, like one in every three of us?

A comparison of Millennial women's lives to their G.I. or Silent Generation grandmothers reveals the startling pace of change. My paternal grandmother was born before women could vote in the U.S. At my age, my maternal grandmother was preparing for an arranged marriage in rural Japan. As a young woman in 2007, "women can't vote" or "arranged marriage" both sound like a set-up for a punchline - far from my reality.

Things do change, and surprisingly quickly. Let's start giving our daughters some change to thank us for.