HAS BABY BOOMERS’ GOODY-GRAB LEFT THEIR KIDS FACING A BLEAK FUTURE?
An article in this weekend’s Observer magazine claims the so-called ‘lost generation’ of graduates have been royally shafted – by your own parents.
In the six-page feature, 27-year-old journalist Andrew Hankinson claims ‘intergenerational unfairness’ will blight the entire lives of people his age and younger.
“Our parents had free education, fat pensions, early retirement and second homes,” he says.
“We’ve been left with student debt and a property ladder with rotten rungs.
“And the only choice is crap job – or no job. Thanks very much.”
As typically follow articles on this subject, the responses to Andrew’s feature fall into two categories. Fellow graduates who agree with him – and older correspondents sneering at him for having unrealistic expectations about the lifestyle his qualification would (or should) ‘buy’ him.
Graduate Fog is in neither camp. Yes, Andrew’s expectations are unrealistic -but who put them there? Shouldn’t his school accept some blame for failing to point out the truth before he signed up for his degree? (He was, after all, only 17 – not old enough to vote – when he made the decision to go to university – and in turn, take on enormous debt).
And shouldn’t the universities take responsibility too, for leading students to believe their education is guaranteed to give them a significant ‘leg-up’ on the career ladder – when in many industries that simply isn’t true? When students are paying for their time in Higher Education, they deserve to understand what their completed degree is likely to ‘get’ them – and what it won’t.
Unfortunately, Andrew persistently undermines his (otherwise strong) case by coming across as snooty and entitled – and his lack of respect for hard-working non-graduates borders on offensive.
Happily, although the emails I receive from Dude and Graduate Fog fans share Andrew’s frustration, they do not share his ‘victim’ mentality.
Yes, you’re disappointed, frustrated and yes, angry.
But you’ve twigged that that locking yourself into this defeatest mindset won’t help you get a job. In fact, it will stop you getting a job.
Instead, you tell me you’re done with wallowing – instead, you’d prefer to crack on and find out how to boost your chances of getting your career started. You understand that the first step is taking responsibility for your own future – not blaming others for how hard everything seems.
Which is why my money is on you getting a job long before Andrew does.
Perhaps I should send him a copy.
Do you agree with Andrew? Read the full story here
An interesting take on it. Thanks for helping to keep grad chins up.
I think some people felt they had no other choice than to do a degree – then they were forced to pay for it themselves, got lumbered with all the debt and now have a disproportionate amount given their current earning potential. It’s a tricky one. It makes me feel a bit better to know there are so many in the same boat.
Hi Tanya,
I think Andrew needs to read your book. It certainly helped me during those dark months following graduation, when reality came hurtling towards my unrealistic expectations of post-graduation life like an angry careers adviser towards the person who (rightly) accused them of being out of touch.
I’d like to say a big thank you for your book. I read it from cover to cover twice, and then kept coming back to it every so often to keep my spirits up. For me the best aspect of your book was that it changed the way I looked at my situation and made me realise that my future was in my hands. I needed to hear that it was okay to be feeling the way I was (disappointed, angry, frustrated, and disillusioned), that I wasn’t ALONE, that the world of work has changed, and that there was hope. Perhaps more importantly though, I needed to hear that in order to pull myself out of this hole I was going to need discipline and an action plan!
We put so much effort into achieving qualifications, seeing a university level qualification as the absolute pinnacle and therefore think that once we graduate it’s all easy sailing from then on. Whereas the exact opposite is true, we need all the discipline and effort that we applied to our academic studies, as well as needing to do other things that no-one teaches you how to at university: like talking to people in the industry, learning how to speak their language, seeing it from the employer’s or buyer’s perspective, what they are looking for and which skills they need. The truth is that a graduate could go into any number of industries, most of which are changing at a frightening pace and some of which are in sharp decline or undergoing immense change. Unfortunately though, with most careers advisers living on another planet, it’s up to us to be doing the research and coming up with a focused strategy, rather than indiscriminately sending off piles of CVs the few employers that contact the careers services or those which advertise their job vacancies.
I was blissfully unaware of the effort required on my part and graduated from my undergraduate degree with not a single idea of what I wanted to do or where even to start looking, and then surprise surprise, stumbled into a master’s degree. Fortunately though your book gave me the kick I needed to make sure that this time I would start defining targets and working towards them at the BEGINNING of my degree, and by the time I graduated I had already been working full-time for months.
The best part is that your book made me rethink what it was that I actually wanted from a “job”. I realised that perhaps I didn’t want a “graduate job” at all, whatever that is supposed to mean, in fact, maybe I didn’t even want a “job” at all. When I discovered that the industry I wanted to work in actually had virtually no in-house jobs any more (something which my careers adviser should have been able to tell me but was blissfully unaware of) instead of panicking and giving up because there were no jobs to apply for, I embraced the idea of being self-employed and accepted the challenge of making my own opportunities. Now I have the two things which are really important to me: meaningful, intellectually stimulating work and being able to feel that my work is fairly remunerated, and better still, no boss!
Not that it’s all a bed of roses and sometimes being self-employed is kind of like being permanently unemployed, especially from your mother’s perspective — mother: “poor thing, you know, I’ve heard that they need people with languages in…”, me: “for the last time, I have a job!”. Working freelance means that you have to constantly market yourself, not to mention deal with the feast or famine cycles, but I can honestly say that your book has better equipped me to deal with challenge in general. I think your book is relevant to anyone who is looking for a job or freelance work, or who is looking to change direction or has just been made redundant due to the crisis or a shrinking industry, quite simply because it addresses something that other books fail to mention: how the search for work makes you FEEL, how constant rejection can make you feel demotivated and how to mentally overcome these feelings, keep fighting and actively searching for those hidden opportunities. A lot of what you say in your book seems obvious and plain common sense when you think about it, but yet no one else is saying them, so thank you for being a such a pioneer.
I read the same article in the Observer. I am currently trying to find a graduate job, and this article really scared me. I did some searching around the internet to find some comfort that the graduate market wasn’t all doom and gloom. The best site I found for comforting students in their search for graduate jobs was this blog:
http://blog.gradfutures.com/
All you unemployed graduates out there, I share your pain. Lets band together and find our perfect graduate scheme.