Had enough yet?

[Igel]

49. A lot of kids are truly pessimistic, verging on nihilistic.

They're often the ones that need additional motivation because they're already facing some sort of difficulty: Discrimination, economic disadvantage, etc., etc.

"Why should I go to college? Because of the TPP I won't have a job when I get out, anyway."

That's an excuse for not trying. It says, "If my rewards aren't going to be equal to my effort, I should gauge my effort to my likely rewards." It's justification for doing what is easy and most likely more enjoyable in the short term.

A lot of these kids have been handed pre-made excuses for slacking off by their parents and society for years. My favorite is "there's no social mobility." Yeah, that kid in the bottom 10% has a small chance of getting into the top 5%. Nobody cares that he has a decent chance of winding up in the middle 20%. If you can't go from family income of $10k/year to $300k/year, what's the use of landing at $40k or $60k/year? I'm sure nobody here would find *that* an improvement. Kids learn these these somewhere.

Even now, college grads overall have a 2.7% unemployment rate and good workforce participation. For recent college grads, unemployment and underemployment rates are what they were in the early '90s, and that's counting "I'm an English major working as a fulltime bookkeeper" as "underemployment". Notice this: that's coming off a hellacious recession and *after* NAFTA and a raft of other free-trade agreements versus coming off of a relatively mild recession pre-NAFTA.

One difference is that mismatched-job "underemployment" is putting college grads in some fields in jobs that earn less than was the average in the early '90s. However, these grads mostly still have jobs (with the unemployment rate in the low teens, much lower than recent grads with no college), and the lag between underemployment and getting job using your degree is holding steady. In other words, most of those mismatched in 2010 are now much better matched.

In other words, the kids are learning their pessimism from somewhere, and it's not really the data doing the speaking.

So yesterday somebody posted that "50% of college graduates are unemployed or underemployed"--meaning not working full time. This, of course, was horribly counterfactual. But I've seen that statement floating around. People want to be pessimistic and, to be honest, it's hurting the kids who need the hurt the least.