Why should a Gen Y be obligated to support someone who has the ability to be gainfully employed if they would learn a new skill. Too often a Gen Y can’t get a job because the Baby Boomers won’t move out of the workforce because they didn’t save enough and/or were jilted by the stock market? With few jobs being created, Gen Y (along with many others) don’t have the same opportunity Boomers did coming out of school. (Gen X however has lived through up and down markets.)

A lot of the jobs today are currently being held by people who don’t have the skills to do the job or do it more productively and effectively. Studies show that as much as 50% of our workforce is functionally illiterate. A significant number of job applicants can’t even fill out a job application yet were just a few months ago holding down $60,000+ per year jobs. A lot of employed Boomers and Gen X are holding onto jobs, but are neither motivated nor skilled enough to do them. They do the minimum to hold onto a job. Many young people have the skills, ambition, and smarts but aren’t being given the opportunity. Why should anyone have to sit on the sidelines if they are more qualified?

I agree that whining doesn’t help but working 30 years in a job without ever enhancing your skills shouldn’t earn a lifetime of government support either. Since the Baby Boomers didn’t do such a hot job of ensuring the pension funds were liquid, why should Gen Y be expected to bail them out?

I’m writing this from the perspective of an older Boomer holding 3 post-graduate degrees, the 3rd one earned just last year. I’m not a Gen Y looking for a job, but a gray-haired, balding Baby Boomer trying to stay at the forefront.

While I agree that any number of degrees should not entitle one to a high-paying career, I respectfully disagree that hard work alone is enough. There are certainly many young people entering the workforce with a whiny attitude but I can easily pair each one of them with a Boomer with an equally negative attitude.

The comments to my original post thus far seem to confirm resentment between generations. I propose that each generations is responsible for passing the buck onto other generations and that we each need to take personal responsibility for our actions and place in life.

But this does open up an important topic about higher education and the value versus the cost. I don’t have time right now to dig up the citation but the price of an education has increased more than 100 times over the last 50-60 years and it has certainly not yeilded that much gain.

It has only been in the last one hundred years that the level of education that one attains has largely decided how far one can go. Most of the typical office jobs that people go into today do not require a four year degree to perform. Our grandparents did them just fine with only a high school education.

When the demand for more of something occurs, in this era that something being formal education, the quality of that thing that is in demand generally goes down. (Getting a master’s degree online is an example.)

The era of more formal education meaning more income may well be now ending. This process has actually been underway for awhile: the recession of 1981 – 1982 was the first one during which newspaper editors enjoyed publishing stories of people with PhDs driving cabs.

Reality is that, excluding the element of luck, the main differentiators between material success and failure are what they should be: hard work, hustle, interpersonal skills, vision and, the single most important one of all, force of will. Nothing can beat sheer determination. My observation on this point is not an original one.

Boomer, Gen X or Gen Y, it makes no difference – just because someone has sat on their butt in a classroom for four or six more years than someone else, why should that alone guarantee them a prosperous future?

Richard J. Kennedy (for the record I have a BAS and an MBA)

Unfortunately, we’ve placed so much emphasis on it that we have inadvertently devalued a bachelor’s degree in the process. I see dramatic evidence of this in job postings for administrative assistant positions that require bachelor’s degree. If I were to recommend anything to the Gen Yers, it would be go to a community college, pick up some practical skills for a fraction of the cost and worry about a bachelor’s degree later.

With respect to the boomers, what he/we are experiencing is not indefinite. There is an unavoidable demographic cliff coming and there is going to be a massive shortage of talent. For all the resources boomers have sucked up during their ‘tenure,’ they haven’t managed to obtain immortality.