NYT Magazine: 'What is it about 20-somethings?'

The Colgate kid was one example. And everyone loved it because it confirmed an old SportsJournalists.com (and middle-class America) trope: That kids who go to fancy schmancy schools or grow up with money are not going to be able to hack it in the real world, not compared to those of us who graduated from the School of Hard Knocks.

I bet if we looked into it, you would be dead wrong and I would be dead right. We'll take the percentage of kids from Williams and Amherst and the Seven Sisters schools and so forth and so on, and compare them to the kids walking out of your average juco, community college, or satellite commuter campus. I know which ones are going to be more likely to be living in mom's basement, raiding the refrigerator and playing video games. It's not the former.

The idea that men and women who go to expensive Eastern colleges walk around with a silver spoon in their mouth and don't know how to work hard, not compared to all the community college grads ... it's just tired at this point.

 

Find that data and get back to me.

 

Keep telling yourself this.

If I owned a business and you owned a business, in the same town, and I hired graduates from Swarthmore and Williams and Middlebury and Wellesley, and you hired graduates rocking their associate's degree from Podunk Community, my business would eat your business for breakfast every single day of the week.

I don't care if it sounds elitist.

 

Well, there's a reasonable argument, since obviously I would never be able to find anyone who got a full bachelor's degree from a state university.

I hope you're prepared to pay your grades $75K or more, otherwise they're going back to grad school.

 

I like how you say "graduate school" with contempt.

It's a shame how all the educated people are bringing down America. And it is no surprise that it took about seven posts before that SportsJournalists.com go-to hypothesis reared its head.

Again, do you really, really think that the graduates of elite liberal arts schools are the ones not growing up by age 30? Really? In your heart of hearts, that's what you believe?

Also, my guess is that parents don't pay for graduate degrees most of the time. I'll try to find something to back that up, but it is my guess that most graduate students are utilizing student loans.

 

I do believe that, yes. And clearly the editors of the New Yorker believe that, since that is the picture of the "zeitgeist."

I know every example anyone offers is immediately derided as "anecdotal," but of say 50 families I know whose kids are in college or have been recently, the ones who tend to stay under their parents' thumb the longest are the ones who went to private schools. Just my observation, but I find it holds pretty true.

 

Anecdotal.

 

People in our business ignore the facts that they don't support their populist worldview.

Remember the Pulitzer Prize winner from the small paper in Virginia? The working class hero? The man of the people, the real American who beat all the big boys?

University of Chicago.

Amazing all the reporting he was able to do from the comfort of mom's basement.

I got hammered for it on another thread, to the point that someone had to take a vacation from the site for getting angry at me, but if I can pull it off, my children will not work during school in high school and college. They will go to the best schools they can get into. Oh, and they will not be living at home at age 22, either.

 

Social trend stories in the New York Times are a) always about people or families with incomes over $250,000 a year and b) total bullshit.

 

Dick -- I think your passion for this subject is getting the best of you. I don't think I ever said a private school education, or any education enabled by parents' financial standing, automatically prohibits success. I am saying that when you find one of these situations where an able-bodied and able-minded 28-year-old is living at home and stuck in what the article calls "emerging adulthood," it's usually because the parents have quite a bit of money and have given the child access to it. There is quite a bit of research on this topic; my favorite is probably "The Millionaire Next Door," which makes a compelling argument that giving adult children financial assistance holds them back.

To frame it in the article's point of view, think of it this way: When adolescence was first acknowledged, do you think the farmers willingly allowed their children to delay adulthood until age 18 because a bunch of psychologists told them it was the right thing to do? Or do you think the upper class adopted this thinking first, while the farmer's 14-year-old sons continued to work the fields?

 

I don't doubt this.

But I also don't think that too much education is the problem. My guess is that the majority of boomerang adult children are college dropouts. But those stories wouldn't surprise and titillate us the way the stories of Ivy Leaguers shacking with their parents do.

 

i saw a similar thread over on sg.com

(sweeping generalizations.com)