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Chapter 7 Leadership for a New Economic Era Like their GI Generation great-grandparents before them, members of the Millennial Generation began to enter the workforce in significant numbers just when the American economy was shedding jobs at a record pace. Older observers questioned whether the young generation’s optimism and sense of personal confidence would fade under these economic pressures, or at least cause its members to lose their taste for liberal, interventionist economic policies. Survey results suggested the answer to both questions was a resounding “no.” Despite enduring higher levels of unemployment than any other generation, a Pew survey conducted in May 2009 at the height of the Great Recession found that 56 percent of Millennials were pretty well satisfied with the way things were going for them financially, a significantly greater degree of optimism than aging Boomers expressed in the same survey (46%). Seventy-two percent were optimistic that Barack Obama’s policies would improve the economy, and 65 percent believed those policies would reduce the federal deficit in the long run, more than any other age cohort. One year later, 44 percent of Millennials still felt that President Obama’s economic policies had helped to avoid an even worse economic crisis and were laying the foundation for an eventual economic recovery. Only 36 percent agreed with the Republican message that the president’s policies had run up a record federal deficit while “failing to end the recession or slow the record pace of job losses.” Just 26 percent of all Millennials accepted the proposition that “government is not the solution to our economic problems; it is the problem” (Allstate/National Journal 2010). While only a third of older generations expected to be better off economically in 2011, 58 percent of Millennials 121 expressed confidence their economic situation would improve in the coming year (Winograd and Hais 2010a). Instead of sinking into despair, Millennials adopted a number of coping strategies to help them weather the economic maelstrom. Parents’ homes and attending school became increasingly popular safe harbors. In fall 2009, 70 percent of high school graduates were headed to campus, an all-time high (Rubin 2010). Community college applications soared by 17 percent (Brownstein 2010c), and nearly one in five undergraduates decided to prolong their education until the job market improved. To pay for their extended education, many juggled multiple jobs and moved back in with their equally cash-strapped parents, while running up additional debt. According to the census, 56 percent of men and 48 percent of women between eighteen and twenty-four years old were either still under the same roof as their parents or had moved back home (Roberts 2009). Thirteen percent of parents with grown children told Pew researchers in May 2009 that one of their adult children had returned home in the last twelve months. Other Millennials used the lack of jobs in the private sector as an opportunity to fulfill their generation’s distinctive desire to serve its community. In 2009, AmeriCorps, the national service program created by President Bill Clinton, received two and one-half times more applications than it did in 2008, and applications continued to rise by 60 percent in 2010. Peace Corps applications jumped almost 20 percent, to the highest level in the program’s nearly fifty-year history. Applications doubled, to over 35,000, from young college graduates who wanted to “Teach for America” in high-need public schools. Meanwhile, the share of army recruits with high school diplomas jumped to 95 percent from its normal level of around 80 percent (Brownstein 2010c). Scotty Fay, a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts, typified this desire to serve in the face of adversity. “If we excel and we’re able to keep ourselves working, we’ll be OK, we hope, because we haven’t experienced anything different than that,” said Fay, who worked two jobs on top of her full-time course load before heading to her Peace Corps assignment in Guinea (Moore 2009). But the economic decline did cause some Millennials to question what they had been taught about how to get ahead. As Josh Donahue, a twenty-three-year-old Oregon State economics graduate forced to live C h a n g i n g t h e W a y A m e r i c a n s W o r k a n d L e a r n 122 [3.16.81.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 11:10...

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