After being dismissed from her job as a Midtown
Manhattan securities attorney in October 2009, Christina
Tretter-Herriger hitched a used horse trailer to her Dodge Ram pickup and drove
1,628 miles to Texas.
The 32-year-old lawyer sold skin-care products in
Houston before finding work as the assistant general counsel of a
futures-trading firm where an irate customer punctuated a recorded voice-mail
message with gunfire.
“No one was left with the impression that he just
happened to be phoning from a sporting clays range,” she says.
Eighteen months and two busted jobs later, the
daughter of a retired physician and a former editor at Vogue circled back to
upstate New York and hunkered down at a small legal office that
pays about one-quarter of her former $165,000 salary.
Generation Y professionals entering the workforce are
finding careers that once were gateways to high pay and upwardly mobile lives
turning into detours and dead ends. Average incomes for
individuals ages 25 to 34 have fallen 8 percent, double the adult population’s
total drop, since the recession began in December 2007. Their unemployment rate remains stuck one-half to 1 percentage
point above the national figure.
Three and a half years after the worst recession since
the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the
under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the
American dream of each generation doing better than the last. The nation’s
younger workers have benefited least from an economic recovery that has been
the most uneven in recent history.
‘Permanently Depressed’
“This generation will be permanently depressed and
will be on a lower path of income for probably all of their life -- and at
least the next 10 years,” says Rutgers professor Cliff Zukin, a senior research
fellow at the university’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.
Professionals who start out in jobs other than their first choice tend to stay
on the alternative path, earning less than they would have otherwise while becoming
less likely to start over again later in preferred fields, Zukin says.
Michael Greenstone, who was chief economist at the White House Council
of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, says the shift to a downwardly mobile
society may be lasting. “Children are not earning as much as their parents, and
I think we’re laying the seeds for that to continue into the future,” he says.
Only one-fifth of those who graduated college since
2006 expect greater success than their parents, a Rutgers survey found earlier
this year. Little more than half were working full time. Just one in five said
their job put them on a career path.
Disappearing Jobs
Those who finish only high school or drop out fare worse.
Almost four out of five jobs destroyed by the recession were held by workers
with a high school diploma or less, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
Middle-income jobs are disappearing for a wide range
of young professionals. The number of financial counselors and loan officers
ages 25 to 34 has dropped 40 percent since 2007, outpacing the 30 percent drop
in total jobs for the profession, according to the federal Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
Similarly, the number of hours logged by first-year
and mid-level legal associates -- a productivity measure of young lawyers --
fell 12 percent from 2007 at some of New York’s largest law firms, says Jeff
Grossman, national managing director of Wells Fargo Private Bank’s Legal
Specialty Group in Charlotte, North Carolina. Yet profits per partner climbed $50,697 to $1.5
million on revenue of $66 billion last year, according to a separate survey of
86 of the world’s top law firms by The American Lawyer magazine.
Lost Faith
“I had a lot of faith in the system, the mythology
that if you work really hard you can achieve anything, and the stock market
always goes up,” says 2009 law school graduate Elizabeth Hallock, 33. “It was
pretty naïve on my part.”
Hallock is the named plaintiff in one of 14 lawsuits against some of the nation’s best-known law
schools, including her alma mater, the University of San Francisco School of Law. The civil complaints, filed in 2011 and 2012, accuse
the institutions of overstating graduates’ job-placement results and incomes.
Young Americans are struggling to reconcile their lack
of economic rewards with their relatively privileged upbringings by Baby Boomer
parents and the material success of their older peers, Generation X, born in
the late 1960s and 1970s, says Kathy Sheehan, general manager of GfK Consumer
Trends and Roper Reports, a unit of German-based research firm GfK.
Great Expectations
“It’s a generation that had really high expectations,
in some part driven by the way they were raised by their boomer parents,” she
says. “Yet in the past five years they have had reality slammed in their face
by the employment situation.”
About 61 million people, one-fifth of the U.S. population, work at jobs where median earnings declined since
2007 even as the 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1
percent saw their pay rise 5.5 percent last year. Younger workers are experiencing
the worst of the disparity in part because they’re being displaced by older
workers. The number of employees ages 55 to 64 is expected to surpass the under-24 working population by 2020 for the
first time since at least World War II, according to the BLS.
Dashed expectations crimped even some of the most
innovative corners of the economy. Daniel White was wrapping up a week-long
vacation to Vermont two summers ago when a co-worker at
Chicago-based Groupon Inc. (GRPN) called to share the news that White was about to
be fired from the e-commerce discounter.
Father’s Power
The 27-year-old business school graduate was living
from paycheck to paycheck, cold-calling hair salons and pizza parlors in
Youngstown, Ohio, from crowded offices at company headquarters when he
found himself out on the street.
“To be honest, I’m glad it happened,” he says. “I
guess I owe that to Steve Jobs, who made getting fired cool.”
This year, White says, he hopes to earn $2,000 at his
own startup Web-sales venture in Burlington, Vermont, seeing technology as the
one path to potentially matching his father’s generation, “the people with the
money and power.”
In more traditional jobs, the fallout from the
subprime- mortgage collapse a half-decade ago continues to pummel people,
including the architects who designed homes. The number of them ages 25 to 34
has fallen by 41 percent since 2007, compared with the total drop in the
profession of 25 percent.
At the Seattle architectural firm of Callison LLC,
faces and names began to disappear from the staff directory almost immediately
after new hire Eli Hardi joined in January 2008.
Smaller Paychecks
“People would drop off on a daily basis,” says Hardi,
28, a recent graduate of a five-year architecture degree program in California. Within a few months, Hardi rose from an hourly to
salaried position. The promotion wiped out overtime pay and reduced his annual
income by 12 percent to $39,500, he says.
The smaller paycheck reflected cost-cutting that has
erased 40 percent of U.S.
architectural firms’ revenue and almost one- third of their personnel since
early 2008, according to the American Institute of
Architects inWashington.
Hardi worked through Christmas and New Year’s before
being laid off during the first week of January 2009, 13 months after his
hiring. He walked home in the cold to his apartment and new big-screen TV that
was now a symbol of his uprooted ambitions.
“It’s a bit sudden, a bit jarring,” he says. Still,
“there’s a certain sense of relief that you don’t have to deal with the sword
hanging over your head. I almost felt worse for the people who had to stay,
knowing they might lose their jobs.”
Highest Unemployment
Architecture graduates ages 25 to 29 had the highest unemployment rate of 57 degree programs surveyed by the Education
Department in 2009. Their 9.6 percent jobless level rivaled the 10.6 percent
unemployment for all Americans ages 25 to 29 that year, including those without
college degrees. Nursing fared the best with a 1.5 percent jobless rate.
Hardi was called back, at his previous salary, in
January 2010 as Callison won store-design work for Apple Inc. (AAPL)
“The hours were long, the pay was low and we got a
notice saying the bonus would be minimal,” he says. “The hardest part, I found,
is to maintain your own self respect and dignity.” In March, he quit to join a
smaller firm where he works on historical renovations.
The same housing crash that hammered young architects
and loan officers also slammed lawyers. Law schools are turning out about
45,000 degree holders a
year for about 25,000 full-time positions available to them, according to the
National Association for Law Placement Inc. in Washington. The class of 2011
had the lowest placement with law firms, 49.5 percent, in 36 years.
Tougher Path
“It is not the perfect path to wealth and success that
people may have envisioned,” says Robin Sparkman, editor in chief of The
American Lawyer magazine in New York.
Some of the disenchanted have taken their complaints
to court. Plaintiffs’ attorneys and recent law-school graduates are pushing to
change what they call law schools’ overstated reports of post-graduation
employment numbers. The results are used in magazine rankings of the
institutions and to recruit new applicants. In state-court lawsuits, the former
students allege false advertising and consumer fraud.
The claims are “meritless,” says Angie Davis,
spokeswoman for the University of San Francisco School of Law. “We are sympathetic to the difficulty faced by law
school graduates nationwide in finding employment on the heels of the Great
Recession,” she says, adding the university helps students find work, and many
have found “successful, rewarding careers.”
Contested Lawsuits
With the lawsuits playing out, the Chicago-based American Bar Association began requiring accredited schools to disclose
far more detailed information about new graduates’ employment beginning in
December 2011.
This July, San Francisco County Superior Court Judge
Harold Kahn allowed lawsuits against USF and Golden Gate University to proceed,
ruling that some law-school graduates may have a basis for claims that they
were deceived. Judges in Illinois and Michigan rejected similar complaints.
“It’s hard to look at the information the schools were
putting out and say it’s not misleading,” says Derek Tokaz, research director
of the nonprofit Law School Transparency initiative. It published research showing that
the chance of recent graduates getting permanent full-time work in law was far
lower than the 80-95 percent total employment rates the schools typically
boasted.
Lehman Fallout
Tokaz, 28, worked with Tretter-Herriger at the
Manhattan law firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP. She joined
the firm in September 2008, the same month that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
collapsed, gradually setting off panic on Wall Street and around the world.
The late nights and long weeks awaited by first-year
associates as a grueling rite of passage didn’t come, she says. Instead, there
was so little work to do that the hedge fund lawyers and recruiters she worked
with frequently retreated after lunch to a street-level pub to watch English
soccer.
Tretter-Herriger says she and some other first-year
associates were fired 13 months later with the proviso they could keep their
desks and look for jobs through October. She found one at the Houston futures
trading firm. When it later outsourced some of its legal work, she moved on
again and answered an ad on Craigslist for a job in Buffalo, New York.
She now complements her $45,000 lawyer’s salary by
training horses and giving riding lessons. She says she’d like to buy a rental
property and become self-sufficient in case she loses this job.
“As it is, all of my possessions still fit in the back
of my truck,” she says. “I can pack it in a couple hours, pick up the trailer
and horses and move anywhere the gas tank will take me at the drop of a hat.
What can the system take away from you when you have that kind of freedom?”
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