Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
The Five-Year Party (24 page)
They have no idea how to write a resume or a cover letter. They have no idea how to dress or what to say at a job interview. They have little understanding about how the cool photo of them with their heads in the toilet bowl throwing up that they posted on Facebook will look to recruiters. They have no understanding that they will have to spend some time in the mailroom or some other lower level of the ladder and work their way up. They want to start at the top the day they are hired.
Party school graduates also have little understanding about how strongly their college’s negative reputation will hold them back. After being burned numerous times by functionally illiterate party school graduates, employers are no longer impressed by a degree from We-Party-All-The-Time U. As part of its 2008 College Salary Report, the PayScale research organization looked at the difference in earnings between graduates of party schools and graduates of the best Ivy League schools. The researchers took the
Princeton Review
’s list of the ten top party schools and compared the numbers with schools like Harvard and Dartmouth in terms of average pay three years after graduation and twelve years after graduation. The difference between the salary of a graduate from a party school like Florida State and the salary of a graduate of an Ivy League school like Dartmouth was $51,000 after a dozen years, which would add up to $1.5 million over thirty years.
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Princeton Review
’s list of the ten top party schools and compared the numbers with schools like Harvard and Dartmouth in terms of average pay three years after graduation and twelve years after graduation. The difference between the salary of a graduate from a party school like Florida State and the salary of a graduate of an Ivy League school like Dartmouth was $51,000 after a dozen years, which would add up to $1.5 million over thirty years.
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Even before the economic meltdown in 2008, recent college graduates were having increasing problems finding any kind of employment. As early as the spring of 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were simply not enough jobs for the new graduates. “Although college graduates have more job opportunities than groups with less educational attainment, their job opportunities have kept even less pace with population growth over the past sixty-one months than the job opportunities of the population in general,” the Center for American Progress reported.
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By 2008, however, job prospects for college grads had declined even more, according to The Colleg iate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. “In two short years we have moved from a zenith of exuberant and aggressive college hiring, through a period of cautious optimism, to a place of quiet desperation.” Of the companies included in the survey, 49 percent expected to decrease their hiring of new grads. “It’s going to get worse,” said Philip D. Gardner, director of the institute.
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By 2009, even college graduates who had secured jobs connected with their chosen careers were being laid off and unable to find new jobs. In New York City, for example, the number of graduates with bachelor’s degrees who were collecting unemployment benefits had risen 135 percent in a single year. That rate was twice that of residents who had only a high school diploma.
“We have not seen this in prior recessions where there’s been such an increase in well-educated people turning to unemployment insurance,” said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute. “It’s an uncharacteristically well-educated group.”
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Many of these party school graduates eventually enroll in community college programs that lead directly to well-paying careers as electricians, plumbers, nurses, medical records technicians, and computer technicians, but then they are paying for two educations: one that led nowhere and a second that trained them for a real job. In fact, the typical community college student no longer comes directly out of high school but is in the mid-twenties-to-late-forties age group seeking a fresh start in a new field. Community colleges have direct relationships with employers in the fields in which they provide training and certificates. Often, a community college graduate has a job waiting the day he or she receives a diploma.
Many professions that depend on a steady supply of eager young recruits to take entry-level jobs have already been hard hit by a generation that simply cannot afford to take a job with low pay. This includes social workers and especially teachers. Many millennials who planned to teach find they simply cannot afford to take a job that pays $28,000 a year when they are $20,000 in debt.
“We absolutely see a chilling effect (on public service professions),” said Robert Shireman, director of the Project on Student Debt. “Students are setting their sights on the future and saying ‘I can’t afford to be a teacher or a social worker.’” He found that 23 percent of public college graduates leave school with too much debt to repay their student loans manageably on a starting teacher’s salary.
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Anthony Daniels was $58,000 in debt when he left Alabama A&M with a degree in education and was ready to start his lifelong dream of being a teacher, but when he did the numbers, he changed his plans and now wants to go to law school. “Unfortunately my situation is not unique,” he said. “In fact, it is becoming the norm. We are losing too many qualified teachers because of student loans. It’s not just a burden, it’s a barrier.”
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The problem can follow teachers for decades. Susan Knable, a forty-six-year-old special education teacher in Collins, Ohio, has $51,000 in student loan debt from acquiring her bachelor’s and master’s degrees a decade ago. A divorced mother of four, she lives in a rental apartment. If it had not been for the loan payments, which she said are like carrying a twenty-year mortgage, she would be able to afford a house. Each month, one of her paychecks covers her rent and her bills and the other paycheck goes to pay off her student loans. “I have a personal goal to get rid of that debt by age fifty, but I don’t know if I’ll make it. I might have to extend it to fifty-two.” Her children have graduated from college and now they too have student loans.
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Another Ohio teacher, Terri Crothers, forty-four, owes $50,000 in student loans, despite having used $20,000 of her own money to pay her tuition bill. At the beginning of 2008, she was six months behind in her payments, and said she is kept up at night by the fear of going into default. “We’re teachers and we’re providing a public service,” she said. “Since our pay certainly isn’t keeping up, we could use help on this.”
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The irony here is that many high school graduates were encouraged to enroll in colleges because party schools promised that they would earn higher salaries and live a more comfortable life. What they hadn’t figured into the equation was the huge payments for student loans, which knock their net worth back below what they would have made if they had taken a job right out of high school.
The crippling debt that party school graduates must deal with for decades after graduation has a devastating impact on their lives. The loans are always there, always getting in the way and keeping them back. It’s part of every decision graduates make, from getting married, starting a family, and buying a house. Thanks to the unethical practices of the predatory loan companies and their close ties to party school administrators, student loans have in some cases become a lifelong burden that robs students and forces them into poverty.
A 2002 survey found that 14 percent of young adults had delayed getting married because of their student loan debt, 20 percent said they had delayed having children, and 40 percent said they delayed buying a house.
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In the four years it took to earn a business degree at Boston University, Tyson Hunter of Seattle ran up a debt of $152,000 in student loans. After graduation, he was hired by a market research company at a salary of $40,000 a year, well above what the average graduate makes right out of college. But his loan payments of $1,000 a month make up a third of his take-home pay. When he finally pays off his student loans, he will be fifty-three years old and will have paid $300,000 in principal and interest. To save money on rent, he has moved into his mother’s condo.
“Buying a house? That’s not even in the ten-year goals,” he said. “The next two years are going to be crippling. Hopefully, after that, it won’t be as crippling.” Unless, of course, he should happen to miss a payment or send one in late. Then his loan will be in default and his $152,000 debt could double or even triple because of penalties and fees.
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Tamara Draut, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos and the author of
Strapped: Why America’s 20- and-30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead,
says our society has created a “debt-for-diploma” system that leaves graduates deeply in debt before they receive their first paycheck.
Strapped: Why America’s 20- and-30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead,
says our society has created a “debt-for-diploma” system that leaves graduates deeply in debt before they receive their first paycheck.
The one thing that all recent college graduates share, she said, is debt. “Young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have 22 percent higher credit card debt than those who were that age in 1989. Young adults between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four are also deeper in debt. . . . In 2005, the average indebted adult under age thirty-four had slightly more than $8,000 in credit card debt.” The most common reasons for the debt were car repairs, loss of a job, and home repairs and 34 percent reported using credit cards to pay for basic living expenses.
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“The rise in credit card debt, coupled with the surge in student loan debt, is the main reason why today’s young adults are spending much more on debt payments than the previous generation,” she said. On average, twenty-five to thirty-four-year-olds spend nearly twenty-five cents of every dollar they make on debt payments, despite the fact that most of them cannot even afford a mortgage.
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Krystal Grube, twenty-four, graduated in 2007 with $75,000 in student loans and landed a job in Boston, where she lives with her fiancé. Her $800-a-month loan payments exceed her share of her apartment rent and she will be paying them until the year 2040. As a result, she said, her options for fun are very limited and she is counting on getting a better job in the future to improve her lifestyle.
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Draut’s own career has been influenced by the impact of her debts. At the age of thirty, she and her husband owed $57,000 in student loan debt and $19,000 in credit card debt. They found themselves sorting through their CD collection to find something to sell to raise enough money to buy food.
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In addition to dealing with crippling levels of debt, recent college grads have to deal with the reality that the dream jobs they sought might no longer exist. Grads stuck in “crap jobs” full of meaningless drudgery and trapped in an office cubicle cling relentlessly to the fantasy that someday a man will call them on the phone and offer them their dream job after all. They often have a difficult time psychologically when they are forced to wake up and face reality. The dream job as a movie director, brain surgeon, wildlife biologist, oceanographer, or astronaut that party school administrators promised would be waiting for them at the end of the five-year party is difficult to let go of, particularly for young adults who have always been told they are perfect and can “be anything they want to be.” Often, it requires a push from Mom and Dad, who get tired of paying off Junior’s student loans and making contributions to the living expenses of their now thirty-year-old children.
Anya Kamenetz, author of
Generation Debt
, has become a spokeswoman for her generation. She said today’s college graduates were told all their lives by parents and teachers to expect the world on a plate, but no one told them they were going to get stuck with the check.
Generation Debt
, has become a spokeswoman for her generation. She said today’s college graduates were told all their lives by parents and teachers to expect the world on a plate, but no one told them they were going to get stuck with the check.
She interviewed more than one hundred graduates for her book and was constantly surprised that so many young adults who had college degrees were working at jobs for which a high school diploma would have been adequate training. This would be bad enough, she said, but most of them were also paying crippling levels of student loan payments. These graduates have become, she said, “a generation whose unbelievably expensive educations didn’t guarantee them success, a sense of purpose or even a livable income.”
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“Cindy,” one of the students she interviewed, attended a four-year college in Georgia but dropped out when she got sick. Her $6,500 in student loans rose to $10,000 after she missed some payments. She gets calls every week from bill collectors. “I regret with all my being having ever gone to college,” she said.
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“Lagusta,” another of Kamenetz’s informers, operates a vegan catering company in upstate New York. She called college “a scam.” She has $45,000 in college loans and said she would never have gone to college if she had had any idea how expensive it would turn out to be.
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“The college-for-all ideal doesn’t serve young people and it doesn’t serve the truth,” said Kamenetz. “Post-high school training is a necessity. But it doesn’t need to be an expensive hardship that takes the better part of a decade. . . . If more young people found their way to well-designed and highly focused vocational programs, we wouldn’t be seeing the same delayed economic independence.”
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Many of the millennials she interviewed have never held a job for more than two years, never had a full-time job, and never had a job that paid benefits. Kamenetz said the good jobs that colleges promised when they signed up have mostly disappeared or have been sent overseas. As full-time jobs have been eliminated, companies increasingly hire consultants or temporary workers for a special project or when business increases.
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