After breakfast, his parents left for their jobs, and Scott Nicholson, alone in the house in this comfortable suburb west of Boston, went to his laptop in the living room. He had placed it on a small table that his mother had used for a vase of flowers until her unemployed son found himself reluctantly stuck at home.
The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter ”” four or five a week, week after week.
Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.
Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.
Need more be said?
$40,000 starting salary isn’t untypical for new faculty in the humanities; just shows what a difference in expectations there can be.
More to the point, in this economy getting a foot on the ladder would seem to be the most immediate imperative.
Bad idea not to start somewhere.
The most significant generational difference I see is the young man not taking the $40,000 job. I doubt the thought of rejecting the job would even have occurred to his father or grandfather if they had been in similar circumstances. Yet here we are with a story highlighting the plight of this poor man, supported in luxury by his parents. The tears are just pouring down my face as I type these words.
I was interviewing new graduates from a Hotel Management University when I asked the question ‘what do you want to do?” invariably I would get the answer “Be in a Management Training Program.’ Many times these bright young people had never worked at all, much less in a hotel environment. I would gently suggest that they, first, might need to learn how to do something of value in their environment. It always came as a shock. Eventually those who chose to go to work in a lower level position and had both education and a great attitude would invariably rise to the top quickly. Three of my grown children, none of who have degrees, have fought their way to the top of their professions using the abiility to work hard, be a better employee, and realistic in the work arena. Why cant we teach young people the truth about the world they will have to perform in? After all, it is called WORK, not play or fulfillment of poor psyches. I would say to this young man- get a life! Do anything but hide behind that computer looking for Nirvanah. Join the Peace Corps. Volunteer somewhere where they need strong leaders. Go west, young man. Reward for hard work, dedication and realistic goals does exist, but not sitting at a desk staring at a lit up screen.
The irony is, the American Dream hasn’t been at all elusive for this kid. He was offered a $40,000 a year job with a substantial, established corporation. His grandparents paid his room and board at a college whose total costs are in the $50,000 annual range…so he has no student loans. I loved this squib from the article:
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“While Scott has tried to make that happen, he has come under pressure from his parents to compromise: to take, if not the Hanover job, then one like it. “I am beginning to realize that refusal is going to have repercussions,†he said. “My parents are subtly pointing out that beyond room and board, they are also paying other expenses for me, like my cellphone charges and the premiums on a life insurance policy.â€
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Gee, ya think? If he was my kid, I would, as Governor Ronald Reagan said of the protesters at UCalBerkeley, “harness (his) youthful enthusiasm with a razor strap (sic).” Well, not really. But he would not be living in my house, on my dime, while he saw fit to turn down perfectly acceptable professional positions.
This is not the story of a bad economy–although there are plenty of those to be written. It is the story of a spoiled young man who was never taught concepts such as starting at the bottom and paying your dues. I pray that he is not iconic of a generation. And presenting his story as being about the economy, rather than about him, does a disservice to those young people who really are desperate to find a place in a society that seems to have no room for them.
What a spoiled, immature young man. I’d love to hear John Rosemond’s take on this poor, deprived individual’s situation.
Too many youngsters of the past two generations expect instant reward without either apprenticeship or sacrifice.
Many of them expect instant recognition and the material rewards that often go along with success without having to ‘put their time in’ and earn that recognition and those rewards.
They are the product of a society that downplays the competition of a meritocracy; doesn’t like to ‘hurt’ youngsters who earned C’s, D’s and F’s; presents awards to student athletes who lose in competitive sports, etc.
this is not at all surprising. This is simply the result of this young man’s having been raised in the “you’re entitled” age. You’re entitled to not be held back in school is you don’t perform; you’re entitled to have a flat-screen tv even if you don’t have a job to earn one; you’re entitled to have a new-model car even if you don’t have a job; you’re entitled to a house mortgage even if you can’t make the payments; and so on. There is no longer any idea that equality of opportunity to doesn’t mean equality of reward when there is not an equality of effort or achievement.
desert padre
I recall that one of the hosts of the Car Talk radio program
posted a sign on the door of his son’s bedroom. It stated :
“Checkout Time is 18”
One of our daughters lived in our house for three years following the completion of her M.A. The first year, after a frustrating job search, she worked at a large bookstore chain for a very low wage which, however, covered her auto expenses and health insurance. Then she took an administrative asst. position, still for a lot less than she hoped to earn, and worked until she was practically running the place and doing things more commensurate with her training. She house-sat for us while we were away, a benefit to all (still paying her own expenses). At the beginning of the fourth year she finally got an entry-level job in the field she was working towards and moved away. Her father and I did something very similar following graduation in the down market of the early 1970s.
This young man’s parents need to be more than subtle. They are enabling dependence.
I should add, we didn’t have to live with our parents. We both got jobs paying very little and rented a very inexpensive apartment.
I’d have jumped at a stable job making $40000 a year out of college. I have a masters degree and work as a priest, and I still don’t make $40k in take home pay.
By first “real” job was my internship. I earned 14,000. I lived in a run down apartment and didn’t have a car. The next 10 years I earned between 17k-22k. The last two I earned 30 and thought I had died and gone to heaven. After 10 years post medical degree (with student debt) I earned 45k and I thought I was rich
If the guy really wants a job on the corporate ladder he should be able to find an internship for subminimum wage someplace. Otherwise he should take the 40k.
Maybe it’s just due to lack of experience, but Scott’s holding out for a career path in a large corporation strikes me as foolhardy given the fact that any employer’s loyalty to their employees is pretty much nonexistent these days. And in terms of liking a job, I suspect that most employees have ended up in career paths they haven’t particularly liked.
Foregoing a job opportunity in hopes of landing a better one later on is not necessarily the wrong thing to do. And there is conventional wisdom that says that it is better to be unemployed rather than underemployed.
BUT… that hinges upon having the means to remain unemployed for a while. If one has that — say, savings from a previous job, or an inheritance, or something — then holding out for a better job is a legitimate gamble. There is the risk, of course, that you lose the bet — you pass up the job you don’t like, and you don’t get anything better — that’s what makes it a gamble. You weigh the odds, you evaluate the risk — but you don’t place the bet if you don’t have a plan for what happens if you lose.
If you don’t have the luxury of being able to stay unemployed for a while, and if you are not in a position to handle losing the hold-out-for-a-better-job bet, then you don’t get to be picky. You take whatever offers, and you try to figure out how to better your lot from there.
The problem with the protagonist of this story is that he’s acting like he has the resources to make the gamble, but in fact he doesn’t. He’s effectively gambling with his parents’ money, and he seems surprised that they have some kind of objection to that.
I suspect that being identified in this interview, and making the statement attributed to him, will further prolong his job search.
Perhaps we’ve decided that in America, we don’t want families that can subsist on a single income. They’re “entitled.” We want to be more like Brazil or Somalia.
It’s the conservative vision.
He apparently doesn’t know what the word “work” means. He needs some sweat labor to teach him a basic lesson about work, what it does, what it is meant to do, what benefits one derives therefrom. His best choice, for now, is to learn tig and mig welding and get a job where these are essential. These are always in demand somewhere. His next best choice is to learn to drive a big rig and get the necessary license. He will make some money, learn what work is, and discover how to graduate from a job like this because there is few incentives as strong as hunger. . His last best possibility is to join one of the armed services wherein he will learn what happens to the hopelessly selfcentered when they are faced with real discipline.
Send him up here. After he works on the farm for a few years, he will know who he is, what he wants, and what he will do to obtain it.
Mother Nature rarely fails to teach those who are obliged to learn.
L
I read this article when it first appeared in the NYT. It’s too bad they used a lazy whiner as their example, because buried behind his story is real issue — one that has received little press coverage. Those jobs which were a first rung up the corporate ladder are gone. Finance, legal, planning, marketing, programming/IT; all gone. Gone to India and other “global resourcing” locations. If a job isn’t “customer facing” it’s either gone or has one foot on the jetway. That’s why he could get a job as a claims adjuster; at least adjusters have to talk to customers. Except for direct sales, the gateway jobs have packed up and left the country. Left behind are the dead-end service jobs. Young people just starting out who want a successful career need to think seriously about following the jobs and leave the US for India or Europe.
This little snot-puss was offered a rather stable position at a salary approaching median income for a family of four. With prudence and modesty he could support a family on that amount year after year with no problem at all.
John W, are you paying attention? Because your comment is a [i]non-sequitur[/i] and amounts to a gratuitous cheap shot. In Taxachusetts the stats are 2:1 that he’s a lib. Given his age and Ivy League degree, the odds are probably much closer to 6:1. Parents, too. Entitlement and dependency are leftie values, not a conservative ones.
FWIW, my kid sister started with a summer job as a part-time file clerk in a region telecom. She dropped out of an eastern liberal arts school after two years because she had trouble with the attitudes and had been asked to come on full-time at a very low level position with the telecom. Fast forward 35 years. Her company was absorbed by SBC/ATT and she is at such a high level of middle management that she could inform them that, no, she would not move to Dallas, but tele-commute from her home in New England.
Same story, my second son. He started working part-time with IBM and used it to pay for his B.Math degree (yes, there is such a thing). A dozen years later he’s a lead software developer with IBM, and making more money than I ever will.
The point is this: entry positions are the name of the game, unless your an elitist. The folks that take entry-level positions do well, advance, and eventually make salaries attracting the virulent envy of those who (quite mistakenly) believed they were entitled to them from the start.
Now, side note. A tremendous number of those same ‘entitlement’ folks believed (also quite mistakenly) that they should begin their lives with the sorts of housing, cars, furnishings, vacations, and such that their parent had taken 30+ years to acquire. Because they could borrow the money, they did, to pretend at that lifestyle, because they believed themselves entitled. We are all now suffering as a result.
And John, again, these folks were overwhelmingly on your side of the political spectrum, not mine.
The article has some interesting tid bits. One of his elders noted that “connections more than perseverance” got people jobs. The economy was also expanding.
It may be that the young man is being a bit too confident or “strategic,” (that’s a bad thing?) but he does odds and ends. He may seem “entitled” but perhaps a more charitable explanation is that he’s a bit surprised by the economic shift downward. This country is not entitled to have a middle class; he’ll have to be content with being part of the proletariat.
Bart, I don’t think he comes from a liberal family. He was looking for jobs in INSURANCE. In the Rotary club I’m in, Insurance people aren’t models for progressivism.
What the article does seem to indicate is that as a country, millenials won’t have the sense that things are getting better unless you’re in the top 1% of the population. The middle class will work a lot harder, and families will need two incomes to support a family.
I don’t know many liberals who support “Entitlements and dependency” because they love entitlements and dependency. For us, it’s kindness to support one’s family, and to help people who are struggling to make ends meet. We understand that bad luck happens. For us, being fair isn’t just a four letter word. We want those who have worked all their lives to have some time to retire in dignity, in gratitude to their working for the country. We’re skeptical, perhaps, in the selective use of “entitlements and dependency” as it makes me think of Paris Hilton and communities that rely on defense contracts for planes that will never fly.
John, $40 K a year [i]IS[/i] middle class. Right in the middle, and for a young single person, frankly, [i]above[/i] the middle.
He turned it down. He turned down what is patently upper-middle-class income for a young single person in his first job.
Please stop attempting to blame society, conservatism, capitalism, for his poor choice. We do not have an income gap nearly as much as we have [i]stupid[/i] gap.
John, #22, you have produced something here that shows how we talk past each other. For you entitlements and dependency is pork-loaded government contracts for big businesses who are unsuccessful in producing what they were contracted for. For “conservatives” those people in those businesses (and those businesses) are working, paying taxes, contributing to the US economy, producing other jobs for others to work and pay taxes.
For conservatives, dependency and entitlements are for folks who don’t work or work very little, who don’t go to free public schools and get an education so they can develop a skill level to be able to work at something productive, who have multiple children out of wedlock, who then start the same cycle all over again for the taxpayers to continue to support, generation after generation. For you, these people are just down on their luck, noble people who are trying to do the right thing, trying to work out of their poverty (if it really is) if us conservatives will only give them a chance.
I submit the truth is somewhere in between, but not necessarily in the middle between these two views.
You have missed the point. After enormous expense, he has studied what is useless. He expect to make this uselessness worth something by persisting in its pursuit. See my entry above. First he needs to learn how to work. Then he needs to study something for which there is a need. Finally, he needs to understand that if he is going to pursue what is useless, he will need a useful job so he can support himself in his “passion.” Poets and painters have been doing this for years and years.
But first he needs to learn how to work, and sweat labor is where you start. That’s right, sweat labor. Real work. Right noqw he is the precious child of the precious class, but he is learning almost but not quite that privilege has its ranks. Larry
Bart, I’m not blaming anybody. He may have made a mistake turning down the first job offered to him. But I don’t think he can be blamed for drinking the kool-aid that Everything is going to get Better if you follow the rules. Nope- you can get your first job and you simply won’t do as well as your parents did. That’s how the economy is doing.
I have no problem with idealizing work, but I am skeptical that managers in corporations always work harder than people in the public – or not-for-profit – sector. I think it’s a bit predjucial and more anecdotal than empirically verifiable. Dilbert cartoons don’t come from the imagination.
$40,000 may be middle class where you’re from, but not up in the Northeast. It’s poverty in Westchester, where rents in some places are $1500 a month. And if he moved, he’d get paid less. More precisely, its an entry level job, and he though he deserved more. He may have been wrong, but we live in a culture that teaches that if you play by the rules, you get what you want. Which is, perhaps, delusional.
When I graduated college in the late ’80’s and started work as a nurse, my salary was ~ $26,900. With inflation, that’s similar to $40,000 in today’s money. “Holding out for something better”?!! Nope…more like a no-load…