I've been watching the debates and looking at the platforms all election season. I would categorize myself, generally, as a moderate-liberal, whatever that actually means these days. I say that in the interest of full disclosure.
I came away Tuesday night feeling incredibly frustrated with both Romney and Obama. It started with the first question, which was particularly relevant to me as a twenty something aspiring PhD in Sociology. Here's a link to the debate video. The education question and both candidates' responses run from the one minute mark to the nine minute mark.
http://www.youtube.com/politics?feature=etp-pv-ype-3bff3fd3f0
Eight minutes, and neither candidate could give a real solution to the job crisis recent college graduates are currently facing. Sure, I've heard talk of increasing manufacturing jobs, which helps people with those kinds of degrees or training. But much of my generation, who were born in the mid eighties and nineties, had a very different idea of the work we would be doing when we grew up. Traditional manufacturing jobs aren't going to do a lot for us. And neither is promising a return to the economic status-quo of the late nineties and early 2000's. A lot of us, myself included, went into knowledge producing fields because that's what we were prepared for throughout our entire lives. For my part, my education set me on a very specific path to study social behavior, use statistics, and perform generally intellectual work. Now, when folks like me ask where the jobs are, it seems that the only answers are that we are over-educated, lacking marketable skills, and should have been more practical.
That answer isn't good enough. You don't get to raise an entire generation to march into a new century of promise, wonder, and progress, then blame them for their unemployment when the last generations' greed and irresponsibility put us in this predicament.
The larger issue for me is that my generation is going to be paying for the sins of our parents' generation. We are going to have to pay off the national deficit. We are going to have to find a way to support an increasing proportion of senior citizens. We are going to have to clean up the mess. And it is frustrating.
My generation has the education and know-how to get work done faster than our parents did, yet we are still paid, for the most part, according to our time rather than our results. We are concerned with sustainability because we have to be, because environmental issues are already affecting us. And we are willing to sacrifice for the greater good, as evidenced by the number of young soldiers who have given their lives in wars started before a lot of us could even vote.
I want to hear about fundamental changes we can make as a country to give millennial generation a shot at the society we dreamed of. Where we work to live, not live to work. Where we can finish our education and actually use our degrees. Where we don't have to spend our entire lives paying down the last generations' debts. Where we are willing to put people over principles. And where young people are actually rewarded for being more productive than their parents were.
That last point is really important to me. Work has changed in the last twenty years dramatically, but we still use an arcane system to reimburse people for what they do. I can find, retrieve, and summarize exponentially more academic literature than graduate students even ten years ago. It's not because I'm "better", it's because technology allows me to do more in less time. Logically, that means I should either a) be able to spend less time working and receive the same compensation (adjusted for inflation) or b) be paid more for being able to get more done. Neither, however, is actually the case. Instead, academic positions have become increasingly competitive and less secure. And that's just me. Our society has changed tremendously and is continuing to change at an even quicker rate, but we are playing by social and economic rules that are outdated and, frankly, counterproductive.
Give me a candidate who understands and is willing to deal with that, and I will gladly deliver my vote.
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