American Dream Vanishing for Today’s First-Generation College Grads

Young Americans have been hit hard by six years of an economic downturn, a downturn that is causing a generar tion to lose the financial stability hard-won by their parents and grandparents before them and see their American Dream slip away.

Dr. Jennifer M. Silva, postdoctoral fellow at The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America at Harvard University, interviewed several recent college graduates to gauge their feelings about their station in American society and to examine their expectations for the future. She tracked down young men and women from working-class families who are trying to "grow up," meaning they are searching for stable jobs, looking to move out of their parents' houses and are starting their own families. She went to service sector workplaces, military bases, colleges and traditional blue-collar workplaces in Lowell, Mass., and Richmond, Va. She asked these young Americans, whose parents did not earn college degrees: "What is it like to grow up today and what stands in your way?"

When she completed the interviews she published her findings in a book called Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. She concluded that young Americans face any number of obstacles preventing them from living stable, adult lives. For many recent college graduates, according to Silva, for many recent graduates coming of age is not just being delayed, it's being fundamentally dismantled by drastic economic restructuring, profound cultural transformations and deepening social inequality.

Silva calls the family the sole safety net for young Americans and insists that it is up to the family to launch young men and women into the future. "The young men and women I spoke with didn't have neighborhoods, communities or other networks that could provide them with support and guidance as they attempted to figure out how to get into college, where to go and how to pay for it," says Silva. "Their parents, who t have college degrees and were often economically unstable, also didn't have the information they needed to make good investments in their future."

Wealthy parents with advanced degrees can call friends to get their children an internship or a job interview or can afford tuition for graduate school. Parents with only a high school diploma are themselves struggling in the job market and growing increasingly insecure about their once stable jobs while seeing their pensions and benefits erode. Without college diplomas these parents don't have the tools and knowledge to help their children navigate the new labor market, in which a college diploma is vitally important. "Working-class youth don't have these supports. They are on their own," says Silva.

Each generation has its obstacles. But at least past generations had expectations of a "traditional adulthood," says Silva. Individuals from these generations would graduate high school at agel8 and move out of their parent's house. Men would find a job and start supporting a family and women would take charge of the household and raise the children. As it turns out these expectations never materialized for some individuals of past generations either, as many baby boomers have struggled through tumultuous adulthoods.

"Growing up used to mean passing through a series of rituals - getting a good job, finding a partner, buying a home, becoming financially independent, having a family. But for working-class kids today, stable blue collar jobs are harder and harder to find," says Dr. Silva.

Many from working-class backgrounds might spend years in college, earn a degree but have no idea how to use that degree to get a good job. Most end up with crippling student loan debt that precludes them from moving out on their own and supporting themselves. This kind of economic insecurity makes it difficult for recent college graduates to enter into serious romantic relationships - after all, they can barely take care of themselves.

Men and women today are more likely to remain unmarried; to live at home and stay in school for longer periods of time; to drift from job to job; to have children out of wedlock; to divorce; or not to have children at all. "Some of these changes are positive - but they have fundamentally changed what it means to grow up. I don't think that the men and women I spoke to will suddenly reach adulthood in a few years, because the stable jobs and relationships that underlie traditional adulthood are gone," says Silva. "Instability is here to stay."

No matter the generation, growing up has never been easy, but it's always been far more difficult for the working class. Past generations, however, have always had a set of economic and social institutions designed to support the transition to adulthood on which to rely. "For example, the availability of blue-collar jobs that paid a family wage," says Silva.

In past generations, Silva says, there was an expectation that marriages should last forever. She acknowledges that young people today have more freedom than the young of the past. Women especially can pursue higher education, advance in professional careers, choose if and when to have children and leave abusive marriages. But that's not the entire story. "Just as many social freedoms for young people have expanded, economic security - well-paid jobs, access to health insurance and pensions, and affordable education - have contracted for the working class. These youth have to figure out what it means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs, shrinking social support networks and fragile families," she says.

Many of the young Americans Silva interviewed shared their nostalgic, idealized view of what it means to be an adult, a view, surprisingly, not based on their parents or grandparents experiences. Some males said they visualize themselves growtag old with a wife, sitting on a porch surrounded by white picket fences. Some women yearned to be taken care of by their future husbands and envisioned themselves barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. These yearnings, Silva says, are the result of their unstable lives.

This idealized view, says Silva, is a direct result of their anxiety. Their daily lives are unstable, they're constantly worrying if they will get enough hours at work to pay their bills, they wonder if they'll have a place to stay and if their parents' marriages will last. All of this is a huge burden on working-class youth. "They have grown up shouldering so much economic and social uncertainty that they long for security, even if that security means giving up some of the freedoms they have gained," says Silva.

To break from their working-class upbringing, many enroll in college, following a dream to better themselves through education. But all too often education, the one institution designed to help them reach this goal, leaves them feeling powerless. While middle-class children inherit the skills, resources, social networks and knowledge required to succeed in a competitive, individualistic economy, working-class children do not possess those skills.

"They feel like they enter into a social contract where if they work hard, take the right classes and go to college, then they were promised a good life," says Silva. "But over and over again, they experience betrayal within the sphere of higher education. For many, the confusion surrounding financial aid and majors, combined with their debt and the challenge to balance work and school and family, makes achieving their goals impossible. They don't know how to navigate the system effectively. And for those who graduate without the knowledge and connections to use their degrees, higher education feels like a broken promise."

Young working-class men and women need new definitions of dignity and progress that do not reduce their coming of age content with insecurity and loss, Silva says in the book's conclusion. "The health and vibrancy of all our communities depend on the creation and nurturance of notions of dignity that foster connection and interdependence rather than hardened selves," she writes.