It's Harder for Your Generation

By Mary Ellen Slayter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 26, 2006

Tamara Draut does not think frustrated young adults are "whiny." Or "lazy." Or "spoiled." Or any of the other insults that are routinely tossed at them by their elders these days.

"Most young people aren't having crises of self-actualization," said Draut, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos, a think tank in New York. "They're having crises of 'how am I going to put food on the table and support my family and still better myself through education?' "

Where many pundits, career coaches and authors see an epidemic of entitlement, Draut sees a completely justifiable sense of unease. "The path to adulthood for today's young adults is a full-blown obstacle course of loop-de-loop turns and jagged-edge hurdles," she writes in "Strapped" (Doubleday, $22.95), her effort to explain why things are so tough for young adults today and what we could do to fix it.

To her, the problems are institutional, not personal. "Far too often, social critics place the blame squarely on our shoulders, maligning everything from our work ethic to our spending habits. If only it were that simple."

Draut, who is in her 30s herself, does not rely on anecdote to prove her point. Instead, she points to the numbers:

· Inflation-adjusted earnings for males age 25 to 34 with a high school diploma dropped from $42,630 in 1972 to $29,647 in 2002. Their college-educated peers saw their earnings slide from $52,087 to $48,955.

· Median rents in the nation's biggest cities, the very places young adults are likely to launch their careers, rose more than 50 percent from 1995 to 2002. The median percentage of their income that young adults can expect to spend on rent jumped from 17 percent in 1970 to more than 22 percent in 2002. It's no surprise to Draut, then, that so many "boomerang kids" find themselves back in their parents' homes long after they have graduated from college, much less high school.

· Almost half of all temp workers in this country are age 18 to 34.

· One out of three young adults lacks health insurance, making them the biggest pool of uninsured workers. And it's not because they think they don't need it: Only 3 percent of young workers lack insurance because they declined available coverage.

She reserves her greatest outrage for the nation's "debt for diploma" system of funding higher education, demonstrating how it affects every aspect of young people's lives, limiting their career opportunities and delaying their plans to buy their own homes or raise families. "Going $20,000 into debt for a bachelor's degree is not the way it's always been," she said.

It certainly wasn't that way for the parents of the boomers. The "Greatest Generation," it turns out, was also the beneficiary of one of the Greatest Successes in American Public Policy.

The GI Bill provided plenty of money to help returning veterans head to school. In 1948, veterans were given $500 a year -- "enough at that time to pay for all but $25 of tuition at Harvard," Draut points out. They also received a $50-a-month stipend for living expenses, about $400 in today's dollars.

In contrast, the average federal grant to students in 2003 was $2,421, which fell, oh, $24,000 short of Harvard tuition.

And what did the government get for providing all this assistance to young people? Lazy, spoiled, good-for-nothing whiners? No, indeed. They got a thriving middle class, Draut writes. They got the hundreds of thousands of accountants, teachers, scientists and engineers who helped fuel the long postwar economic expansion. "Not a bad payback for a mere $91 billion investment (in today's dollars)."

Draut would like to see a revival of that sort of investment in education, one that goes further than merely tinkering with the system through tax breaks and incremental increases in Pell grants. She derided Congress's recent efforts at reform of higher education funding as "a bit like the fire department pulling up to a five-alarm fire with a garden hose."

Government could make a difference again, Draut believes, but for that to happen, young adults will have to become more involved in the political process, instead of believing the myth that their circumstances are entirely personal -- even when it comes to their careers.

Career Track Goes on Break

There will be no Career Track or Career Track Live for the next few months while I am on leave. But please continue to e-mail me your column ideas and suggestions at slayterme@washpost.com.