It is apparently a subtle fact — probably unbeknownst to most of us — that those born between the late 1970s and mid-’90s reek of entitlement. When I discovered this claim, I was quick to dismiss it. Sure, my peers and I are ambitious, hardworking and more than optimistic.
Yes, we do excel in comparison with our parents’ generation, but then again, we were raised in the technological era. What is so wrong with wanting to succeed in everything we do?
Just because we expect greatness, it doesn’t mean we’re a conceited herd of robots. But under the shield of those thoughts, I stumbled onto the highly publicized face of one Rachel Canning.
Let the shame begin.
Upon first hearing her woeful story, I thought it sounded like soap opera nonsense that couldn’t happen in reality: girl sues parents for college tuition. After watching her appearance in court on television, her blank expression and schoolgirl persona made me question everything I once believed about the world in which I grew up.
The thought of Canning and I being in the same sphere made me nauseous until I wondered what the rest of the populace thought.
It brought me to one anxiety-riddled question: Is this how they see us? By “us,” I mean the rest of you hanging your heads at Canning’s catastrophic misrepresentation of our age bracket. We can’t possibly appear that entitled.
However, according to The Huffington Post, we do.
“Baby boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches,” according to The Huffington Post.
The illustrated article goes on to say that “the career goals of Gen Y as a whole have become much more particular and ambitious,” and the reasoning for this is because we were told we were “special.”
While this may have some truth to it — I do recall being told I was “special” — the finger-pointing is wholly unwarranted. Although we may be particularly ambitious, the world we’ve been brought into, inherited and now claim for ourselves is unrecognizable compared to what it was for our parents.
According to Businessweek, last month’s unemployment-to-population ratio for teens was at 25.8 percent.
In an interview with Peter Coy, Andrew Sum, the head of Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies, said that for young job-seekers, “it’s worse than the Great Depression.”
Concerning Rachel Canning, the media unfairly generalizes when it accuses the Y generation of believing a college education paid for by parents is an entitlement. If debt is any indication, many, if not most, of the generation works to pay their college tuition.
At the end of 2013, U.S. students’ debt totaled an unthinkable $1.08 trillion, a 300 percent increase from 2003.
Chris Rong, a 23-year-old dentistry student, told Time’s Sam Frizell, “If the money weren’t a problem, I would live on my own.” At New York University’s College of Dentistry, Rong moved back in with his parents, and by graduation, he’ll have $400,00o in student loans to pay off.
“I’m taking that all on myself,” Rong said.
Spoiled or not, we are still reaching beyond the limits set forth by our elders. We are still embracing a land of much less opportunity and much higher expectations. So let us be optimistic and driven. The “entitlement” brand needs to go.
Opinion columnist Alex Meyer is a creative writing freshman and may be reached at [email protected]
I had to take some time to think about this carefully, because I didn’t want to unfairly characterize a generation. However, I’m going to probably do just exactly that. The pervasive theme of the foregoing essay that the present Gen “Y” is excelling beyond their parents and beyond the “limits set forth by our elders” is enormously familiar, and just as much ego driven garbage as it was when it came up in 1975 (the year of my high school graduation). I came from a family which did not have a tradition of higher education, nor was there any expectation that my high school class would do much more than work at the refineries that are all over the greater Houston-Baytown MSA.
We had, however, every reason to think ourselves as somehow “more” than our parents: we were immediate products of the social revolution of the 60s-70s. We had imperfect, but much better gender and race relation within our group than had our parents. Many, if not most of us thought that better things were in the future for us.
I hate to burst your bubble, but I would match the hard driving ambition of the driven ambitious members of my generation against absolutely anyone. Did they aspire to be multi-billionaire heads of high tech corporations? Yes, they absolutely did! Heard of Mark Cuban, Daniel Snyder, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs?
Were we told that we were special? In a sense, yes. I, and most of the people I knew were told, by their parents, that they wanted us to have opportunities and a better life than they did. Quite a few of us were told, with absolute confidence, that we could be anything we wanted to be. By and large, we did, too. Those of us who aspired, accomplished. On a personal level, I went to medical school. Perhaps nothing to you, but to me an accomplishment which looked as far away as another planet when I was a child. Remember that no one in my family had higher education, many not completing high school. Remember, also, that these same generations which you apparently view as holding you and your colleagues back, are the same people who dreamed of space and went there.
The sad events surrounding Rachel Canning are, likewise, just the most extreme expression of teenagers who have decided that they just aren’t going to be told what to do in any way. Generations of teenagers, male and female, left home to get married and do exactly what they wanted. A very large percentage ended up right back home….. just like Rachel.
What’s the bottom line?
Far be it from me to limit anyone’s dreams or aspirations. Go for it. Learn, excel, accomplish. Just bear in mind that you (and your generation) are FAR from the first to dream, nor are your dreams, by definition, any better than were ours. Finally, in case you didn’t notice, we are enormously proud and impressed by what you are doing……….. just like our parents were.
Bufford Moore, UH/CL Class of 1981(Biology)
All of what you’ve said are true, except that today’s kids have a sense of “entitlement”: that was absent from their parents, and certainly their grandparents — baby boomers like me. Our driving ambitions also included (and still does) things like civic responsibility and making the world a better place, not just technologically but socially, not just our pocketbooks better. The rewards and fruits of our labor would come — in due time — and we were willing to wait for them. But we also understood we must pay our dues first, not just make demands and scream “unfair” if we did not succeed at everything we did. We did not make unreasonable demands of the world, even though we wanted to change it. What we wanted was to work at changing the world, not make the world bend to our will. Maturity and success is also a matter of perspective, not just prosperity.