Pity the poor internship-less rich kid
Our Sam Pape asks today:
I’m curious to see the long-term impact of a lack of internships. Will the classes of 2010, 2011, and 2012 struggle even more to get jobs?
Well, the short answer is that the best-case-scenario job situation for any college graduate in the forseeable future amounts to this. (And he’s one of the lucky ones.)
More broadly, though, job difficulties for recent graduates are not as abnormal or alarming as Sam implies. Finding a first full-time job is never easy, in any economy. The bubble in things like technology and finance since the 1980s made it unusually easy for a certain set of college graduates to make easy money, yes, but that was the exception rather than the norm. The natural order of things is for new grads to struggle. More after the jump:
::
The natural order of things, again, is for new grads to struggle. And so what? If there’s anyone who can afford to put in their time as a wage laborer, it’s a single childless 20something with a B.A. from a good college. It’s utterly fallacious for these people (ok, us) to think they can waltz right from their dorm into a comfortable white-collar job; isn’t the built-in advantage of a good education enough? After all, the two thirds of Americans who have no college degree (never mind the 83% without a B.A.) will have to work much harder, in climbing the career ladder, than an otherwise comparable degree-holder will. Lots of people will wind up living their whole lives, raising families and saving for retirement, on wages from menial entry-level jobs. It’s the height of arrogant entitlement for the fresh college grad to assume, meanwhile, that their B.A. should buy instant membership in the middle class.
While we’re at it — don’t even get me started on internships. My God. I’ve had my share of internships, as a politically-oriented Ivy League jerk generally will, and let me tell you: in most cases they amount to exactly nothing. I’m certainly not going to weep for the rising sophomore who has to, God forbid, spend the summer sitting in his parents’ basement playing Halo and watching movies. Poor unfortunate bastard, missing out on unpaid labor and forced instead into unpaid leisure.
Which brings me to the New York Times article that Sam linked to. I hadn’t seen that. Now, it’s old news that Times style writers have a habit of writing reprehensibly stupid pity-the-rich-people stories (New in the Times Magazine: How the recession has heartlessly ravaged the world of antique spoon collectors! PLUS: Can anyone live in Manhattan for under $350,000 a year?), but this one reaches dizzying new heights. Take a gander at some of these passages:
School’s out for summer 2009, and instead of getting a jump on the boundless futures that parents and colleges always promised them, students this year are receiving a reality check.
The well-paying summer jobs that in previous years seemed like a birthright have grown scarce, and pre-professional internships are disappearing as companies cut back across the board. Recession-strapped parents don’t always have the means or will to bankroll starter apartments or art tours of Tuscany.
…members of this generation have lived their lives like track stars trying to run a marathon at the pace of a 100-meter dash — their parents typically waiting at every turn with a stopwatch.
“Parents have really put a lot of pressure on the kids — everything has been organized, they’re all taking A.P. courses, then summer hits and they’re going to learning camps,” said Peter A. Spevak, a psychologist in Rockville, Md. Now, he said, with opportunities for achievement at a minimum this summer, “there is something to be said about sitting out on a warm evening and looking at the stars — they need more of this contemplation and self-evaluation.”
“Boundless futures”? “Learning camps”? What the fuck world are these people talking about? What parents can afford to pay for “art tours of Tuscany” in a normal economy, never mind a recession? We have got to be talking about the top, like, 2% of the income distribution here. Most college students, in the real world, work every summer and save every penny in hopes that maybe they can pay back their loans before they’re 40. They certainly don’t go to Tuscany. What these brats need isn’t “sitting out on a warm evening and looking at the stars,” what they need is to sweat in a warehouse or a kitchen for a few years and learn what a dollar is actually worth. (Maybe if previous generations of upper-middle class and upper-class college grads had done that, instead of trooping right onto Wall Street and infecting the whole economy with their free-money-without-consequences delusion, we wouldn’t have quite the economic trauma we have now.)
I guess my point is: yes, as the economy settles into its new lower-employment pattern, it’ll be harder for college graduates to find a job. But it’ll be harder for everybody to find a job — there will be fewer jobs in total, and less hours — so college graduates, still the top of our socioeconomic food chain with all the advantages that entails, can darn well suck it up.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Would you like to join in the discussion?Comments
Hi Markus,
Great piece. But I do think you wrote this with somewhat of an unfair blanketed assumption of college students–mainly that they are all young, dependent on their parents, and privileged with a middle to upper socioeconomic status. While there are certainly many instances of this, it is not representative of the entire picture.
There are many college students (both young and seasoned) who may have families, sick relatives, or other responsibilities to take care of as they work low-paying jobs (many times putting themselves through school) on top of a full or part-time course load. Some more “non-traditional” college students are seeking retraining while other students are simply dealing with the challenges of being a first-generation student. And in these circumstances, I think they have every right to expect to obtain a good paying job after they've gone through the rigors of obtaining an education. In many cases, as the first and only one attending college, many students have an entire family looking to them to do better and to provide a path to the middle-class. There was a time when just a high school education and a factory job could do this, but that is no longer the case.
To be fair to you, I don't think your piece specifically targets these types of students, but I do think you leave a lot of room for interpretation here.
You've acknowledged that many college students are working very hard during the summers, saving every penny for the next year. But more than that, many college students do not have the financial discretion to accept an unpaid summer position; they just can't afford it. For these students, not working (during any semester) is not an option. They have to work. They have to get “that” job. They have to address the debt. And sitting in their parent's basement during the summer is just not their reality. And I think this could be true across lines of class.
I haven't entirely missed or negated your point or the intended audience here, but I find it difficult to relate to the image of the college student your words have painted.
July 15, 2009 at 1:10 pmThank you for commenting, RL. All your concerns are valid. But there are a couple of points where I disagree with you:
–You argue that many college students do work very hard and have immense responsibilities, including responsibilities to their families, and deserve every bit of the advantage their degree brings. That's true as far as it goes. But it's still a substantial advantage. Economic hardship is a spectrum, not a binary; a person who labored through college to support their ailing parents is still privileged relative to someone who labored in a car wash to support their ailing parents. And it's still unreasonable for them to assume that advantage should automatically put them in the middle class, absent a period of further efforts on their part.
–You argue that many college students don't have the luxury of taking unpaid internships. That is absolutely true, and a substantial part of why I found that New York Times article so bogglingly ridiculous. But I disagree that it “could be true across lines of class”; if anything at all in a student's life is directly related to their class, it's whether they can afford not to work over the summer or during the year. In that regard I think the college experience of a working-class or middle-class student is fundamentally different from the upper-middle- and upper-class experience the Times article and Sam's post presumed to be the norm.
Does this mean that my blogpost here is aimed mostly at upper-middle and upper-class college students (who may, or may not, make a majority of the pool)? Not really. No college student, from any class, should expect their degree to be an admission ticket to a comfortable job. But nota bene: it's not working-class students who whine to New York Times writers about how hard it is that they couldnt' find work in graphic design, AND they had to cancel their road trip to Vegas, so all they do is watch movies all day, etc. Those are the concerns I'm responding so, so that's the kind of college student I envisioned.
July 15, 2009 at 6:47 pmMy friend Roland wrote today, in response to this post, and I think his comment merits wider reading:
“I really like your post, and my quibble is actually really off-topic but at any rate: I always tend to wrinkle my nose a bit when people extol the virtues of “[sweating] in a warehouse or a kitchen … and learning what a dollar is actually worth.”
I don't mean that you or I as college graduates deserve or are “entitled to” better; I just think that this particular bit of wisdom is (however unintentionally) sometimes a way of sugarcoating a very bitter pill, namely (to be hugely melodramatic about it) being yoked to exploitative capitalist wage-slavery.
Even my meager bit of vicarious experience with the ins and outs of an “honest job” gives me the sense that calling it “honest” is just a way of valorizing its soul-crushingness. The funny thing is I'm not even one to talk – being a real-world-sheltered academic type – but I feel like those who *should* be talking are the most likely to encounter the “you must have forgotten what a dollar is worth” rebuttal.
I certainly see the wisdom in the recommendation (working an unpleasant job *does* force people like us to learn a thing or two), but I just fear that if the idea is spread around too liberally, we are apt to start glossing over the cases in which people – of whatever socioeconomic background – really *shouldn't* darn well suck it up.
Anywho, like I said, kind of orthogonal to your good point, but it's what I've been thinking about lately.”
As a quick response to Roland's valid concerns, I don't mean to glamorize or romanticize difficult work — there's nothing fun or ideal about it, and people of every class have every right to aspire to a comfortable white-collar or unionized job. My intent was to confine that comment strictly to people who otherwise would have no idea that difficult work even exists, and to make clear that in a down economy, college grads don't have a free pass.
July 15, 2009 at 6:50 pmHi Markus,
Thanks again. But as you've probably already guessed, I don't agree with you entirely, though I think I get the spirit of where you are trying to go with this piece.
1. I never said that economic hardship is a binary or a dichotomy. I too understand it to be a spectrum, but I think it is much more fluid and complex then you have described it. I think it's always problematic to take only two factors of two situations and assert privilege based on a perceived relative comparison. Economic hardship is much more complex and multi-faceted than what would appear to be just a matter of “college vs. car wash”. You argue that if two persons are taking care of ailing parents and one is in college and the other is washing cars, the one in college is automatically more privileged. Not so. Privileged how? What assumptions does one first need to make in order to draw that conclusion? The presumption that going to college is “better” than washing cars? For whom? The presumption that if someone had a choice to go to college in lieu of washing a car that one would clearly choose college? And why is that? What informs the privilege you assert there? Where is the “betterness” factor distinguishing the privilege from the disadvantage? Why is it assumed that college is something “better” rather than something different?
2. If you want to go into comparative privilege as it relates to economic hardship, you'll need to look at more factors than occupation. Washing cars is not necessarily an indication of one's privilege, networth, or background. You need more information. In fact, a person washing cars could come from a wealthy background, with an immense networth, while the opposite might be true for a college student. What you may perceive as economic hardship could be simply a side-job, a hobby, a past-time, or a preferred occupation. It is not an indication of his or her debt to income ratio or economic solvency. There are plenty of persons who work low-paying and perceived “undesirable” occupations because they simply enjoy the work or want to do it, not because they “have to.” In that regard, the person washing the car might be more privileged than the college student. There are also a whole set of factors that go into economic distribution and notions of privilege, including race, gender, disability status, and sexual identity (to name just a few)…
There are even more possibilities in the regard of privilege that I haven't touched on. Circumstances are not always as they may seem…
3. Privilege refers to the “unearned,” “undeserved,” and “un-asked” statuses and advantages afforded to a given individual or group based on a number of given categories. It is a capillary force in social relations and flows unilaterally from perceptions of advantage to disadvantage. For privilege to exist, it takes a degree of implicit agreement, acceptance, and recognition of standards and norms. And it takes social construction, as well as institutional and structural enforcement of those standards and norms for privilege to manifest. This answers the questions of: How is it that we've come to recognize privilege in the first place? How do we measure it? Privilege is societal. And it is not as simple or as uniformed as you have posited it to be. I feel that you've misused this word to defend your ideas.
4. When I was talking about the luxury of being able to work unpaid internships, I was talking about that separately from the option of spending the summer in one parents' basement. Regardless of class, if one's parents mandate that she or he must work (for whatever reason) during the summer, the option of spending the summer in the basement is closed (that's what I meant about the “across lines of class” comment).
5. To the extent that you are referring to the employment process being competitive, uncertain, and dependent on the economic health of the job environment, I'll concede your point that “no college student should expect their degree to be an admission ticket to a comfortable job.” Indeed it is important to be realistic. But all of that notwithstanding, insofar as degrees are regarded as qualifications, credentials, and experiences toward a comfortable job, I think the expectation of the graduating college student (regardless of class) is not misguided, unrealistic, or unreasonable.
—-I get your point about the particular voice of the college student portrayed in the New York Times. But you have to acknowledge that the NY Times plays a role in actively seeking out this particular college student to advance the kind of displeasing narrative that you take issue with in your post.
July 15, 2009 at 10:39 pmAt the risk of beating a dead horse; RL, it seems like you're adding a lot of nuance here where there really isn't any need for it. I never intended to lay out a comprehensive metric to determine who is and is not privileged — which is why I emphasized in my previous comment that privilege is a spectrum. I'm only looking at college education as an important factor in the process; to make a stupidly reductive analogy, call it a multiplier in the privilege formula. All else being equal, a college degree is a mammoth advantage in the job market — but I don't mean to claim that it is determinative.
And of course there is a tremendous social aspect to privilege. College education is basically socialization, after all.
But if it'd make you more comfortable and my argument clearer, I can swap out “privilege” for “advantage.” The point is the same: that a college degree is a big boon to the job seeker, and that the negative impact of a down economy on the college-educated job seeker is thus comparatively minor, so they can damn well stop complaining.
–On students being forced into the workplace by parents: in my experience, the sets “students who work for money” and “students who require money” are basically congruent. But maybe my experience is skewed.
–On the NYT: actually I tend to think that the Times doesn't have to seek these people out, because they populate the bubble Times style writers tend to live in. That top 2-3% is heavily clustered around New York to begin with, and our fashionable correspondents (many of them Harvard Crimson and Yale Daily News vets) are not exactly going to hang out in Spanish Harlem, so do the math. Besides, it's not as if Times authors or editors give any indication whatsoever that they find this narrative anything other than earnestly pitiable.
July 16, 2009 at 8:53 pmOkay Markus. Point taken.
July 17, 2009 at 5:43 pmPretty sure companies love the interns. Who doesn't love free labor?
July 17, 2009 at 5:52 pmHave something to add?