Casey Chun/The Fordham Ram
By Laura Sanicola
Many people I grew up with had parents whose life stories followed a similar format: they grew up in one of the New York City boroughs and worked their way into solid professional positions. When they saved enough money to move to the suburbs, they relished in the fact that they had “made it.” Their generation owns their own homes and has saved up enough money to send their kids to college. In turn, they told us to work hard and follow our dreams. Thanks to them, we have the financial stability to do so. But now, on the brink of real life, I wonder if we will ever be able to afford our children the same comforts that our parents gave us.
From where I am sitting, my generation is in a complicated financial situation. Economically, things are pretty bleak. Most of my friends, hard working students at respected colleges, are highly concerned about finding a job that will allow them to pay rent in a safe neighborhood, and still have money to save for the future.
They wait at the Fordham Road Metro-North station and pay thousands of dollars in transportation to head to their unpaid internships that likely will not hire them right out of college. They land a coveted editorial assistant position at a well-known and well-circulated national publication that only pays about $18,000 per year. They take out $40,000 in student loans to attend a school where the starting salary hovers around $40,000. Their first real paycheck and their parent’s first paycheck do not look too different.
Yikes! That is all kinds of depressing.
Of course, I am not speaking for every twenty-year-old living in America in 2015. The people I surround myself grew up similarly to the way I did. We also chose not to major in business or STEM (against everyone’s advice) because we did not like it or we were not good at it or we just did not want to, and we own up to that decision. People pay for the things they are willing to pay for, and if a service we provide is not one of them, then our paycheck will reflect accordingly. But I have a feeling that there was a time where liberal arts graduates got more bang for their buck than they do now. It is great that we are afforded the opportunity to not only to study, but to study what we want, but there are definitely strings attached to that decision that we are just beginning to discover.
My experience as a millennial has been generally positive, all things considered. Nobody has drafted me into a war or made me sell apples on a street corner. Instead I get to attend university and decide my own life trajectory (to a point).
Still, there are probably a thousand articles on the web about the laziness and self-centeredness of my generation, which is why we are doomed to relative financial hardship. That is kind of a cop-out, in my opinion. Wages are pretty stagnant and rent is going up. College graduates flood the marketplace. The so-called “American Dream” of our parents’ generation is not really on anyone’s radar right now. We just want to get a job.
And so the saying goes that a parent should always want their children to do better than them. We are arguably more educated, perhaps even better adjusted, but financially this saying will not hold true for many of us. Can we be okay with that if it means we get to pursue what we want to pursue?
That said, I have a lot of faith in my generation. We are resilient and we know what it is like to work real hours for a travel stipend. We are incredibly optimistic but we hate living with our parents and in the end that’s probably the main force that has driven adolescents to “figure it out” since the beginning of time. It is odd to have so many doors open to you but know that only a few doors will lead to a life where your children might have the same luxury of choice as you have. At this point, we just have to own whatever choose to do and not regret an American Dream that was never really meant for us anyway.
