Are all of today's teens/20-somethings dealing with entitlement issues?

[TMW2010]

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The outlook this time is not so clear. Starved for jobs at adequate pay, the millennials tend to seek refuge in college and in the military and to put off marriage and child-bearing. Those who are working often stay with the jobs they have rather than jump to better paying but less secure ones, as young people seeking advancement normally do. And they are increasingly willing to forgo raises, or to settle for small ones.

"They are definitely more risk-averse," said Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at the Yale School of Management, "and more likely to fall behind."

In a recent study, she found that those who graduated from college during the severe early '80s recession earned up to 30 percent less in their first three years than new graduates who landed their first jobs in a strong economy. Even 15 years later, their annual pay was 8 to 10 percent less.

Many hard-pressed millennials are falling back on their parents, as Scott Nicholson has. While he has no college debt (his grandparents paid all his tuition and board) many others do, and that helps force them back home.

In 2008, the first year of the recession, the percentage of the population living in households in which at least two generations were present rose nearly a percentage point, to 16 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. The high point, 24.7 percent, came in 1940, as the Depression ended, and the low point, 12 percent, in 1980.

Striving for Independence

"Going it alone," "earning enough to be self-supporting" - these are awkward concepts for Scott Nicholson and his friends. Of the 20 college classmates with whom he keeps up, 12 are working, but only half are in jobs they "really like." Three are entering law school this fall after frustrating experiences in the work force, "and five are looking for work just as I am," he said.

Like most of his classmates, Scott tries to get by on a shoestring and manages to earn enough in odd jobs to pay some expenses.

The jobs are catch as catch can. He and a friend recently put up a white wooden fence for a neighbor, embedding the posts in cement, a day's work that brought Scott $125. He mows lawns and gardens for half a dozen clients in Grafton, some of them family friends. And he is an active volunteer firefighter.

"As frustrated as I get now, and I never intended to live at home, I'm in a good situation in a lot of ways," Scott said. "I have very little overhead and no debt, and it is because I have no debt that I have any sort of flexibility to look for work. Otherwise, I would have to have a job, some kind of full-time job."

That millennials as a group are optimistic is partly because many are, as Mr. Kohut put it, the children of doting baby boomers - among them David Nicholson and his wife, Susan, 56, an executive at a company that owns movie theaters.
The Nicholsons, whose combined annual income is north of $175,000, have lavished attention on their three sons. Currently that attention is directed mainly at sustaining the self-confidence of their middle son.

"No one on either side of the family has ever gone through this," Mrs. Nicholson said, "and I guess I'm impatient. I know he is educated and has a great work ethic and wants to start contributing, and I don't know what to do."

Her oldest, David Jr., 26, did land a good job. Graduating from Middlebury College in 2006, he joined a Boston insurance company, specializing in reinsurance, nearly three years ago, before the recession.

"I'm fortunate to be at a company where there is some security," he said, adding that he supports Scott in his determination to hold out for the right job. "Once you start working, you get caught up in the work and you have bills to pay, and you lose sight of what you really want," the brother said. He is earning $75,000 - a sum beyond Scott's reach today, but not his expectations. "I worked hard through high school to get myself into the college I did," Scott said, "and then I worked hard through college to graduate with the grades and degree that I did to position myself for a solid job." (He majored in political science and minored in history.)

It was in pursuit of a solid job that Scott applied to Hanover International's management training program. Turned down for that, he was called back to interview for the lesser position in the claims department.

"I'm sitting with the manager, and he asked me how I had gotten interested in insurance. I mentioned Dave's job in reinsurance, and the manager's response was, 'Oh, that is about 15 steps above the position you are interviewing for,' " Scott said, his eyes widening and his voice emotional.

Scott acknowledges that he is competitive with his brothers, particularly David, more than they are with him. The youngest, Bradley, 22, has a year to go at the University of Vermont. His parents and grandparents pay his way, just as they did for his brothers in their college years.

In the Old Days

Going to college wasn't an issue for grandfather Nicholson, or so he says. With World War II approaching, he entered the Army not long after finishing high school and, in the fighting in Italy, a battlefield commission raised him overnight from enlisted man to first lieutenant. That was "the equivalent of a college education," as he now puts it, in an age when college on a stockbroker's rÃsumà "counted for something, but not a lot."

He spent most of his career in a rising market, putting customers into stocks that paid good dividends, and growing wealthy on real estate investments made years ago, when Grafton was still semi-rural. The brokerage firm that employed him changed hands more than once, but he continued to work out of the same office in Worcester.

When his son David graduated from Babson College in 1976, manufacturing in America was in an early phase of its long decline, and Worcester was still a center for the production of sandpaper, emery stones and other abrasives.

He joined one of those companies - owned by the family of his friend - and he has stayed in manufacturing, particularly at companies that make hand tools. Early on, he and his wife bought the home in which they raised their sons, a white colonial dating from the early 1800s, like many houses on North Street, where the grandparents also live, a few doors away.

David Nicholson's longest stretch was at the Stanley Works, and when he left, seeking promotion, a friend at the Endeavor Tool Company hired him as that company's general manager, his present job.

In better times, Scott's father might have given his son work at Endeavor, but the father is laying off workers, and a job in manufacturing, in Scott's eyes, would be a defeat.

"If you talk to 20 people," Scott said, "you'll find only one in manufacturing and everyone else in finance or something else."

The Plan

Scott Nicholson almost sidestepped the recession. His plan was to become a Marine Corps second lieutenant. He had spent the summer after his freshman year in "platoon leader" training. Last fall he passed the physical for officer training, and was told to report on Jan. 16.

If all had gone well, he would have emerged in 10 weeks as a second lieutenant, committed to a four-year enlistment. "I could have made a career out of the Marines," Scott said, "and if I had come out in four years, I would have been incredibly prepared for the workplace."

It was not to be. In early January, a Marine Corps doctor noticed that he had suffered from childhood asthma. He was washed out. "They finally told me I could reapply if I wanted to," Scott said. "But the sheen was gone."

So he struggles to get a foothold in the civilian work force. His brother in Boston lost his roommate, and early last month Scott moved into the empty bedroom, with his parents paying Scott's share of the $2,000-a-month rent until the lease expires on Aug. 31.

And if Scott does not have a job by then? "I'll do something temporary; I won't go back home," Scott said. "I'll be a bartender or get work through a temp agency. I hope I don't find myself in that position."