Gen Y: Community Focused or Money Hungry?

Today’s college students and recent graduates are generally referred to as Gen Y, Millenials, or Echo Boomers. Regardless of what we call them, who are they? Are they the community focused, environmentally conscious, work to live rather than live to work people of which surveys seem to repeatedly paint a picture? Or are they money hungry, free agent job hoppers that drive retention oriented employers nuts? Well, they’re both and to understand why, it is critical to understand the Rule of 7-11.

By 7-11, I’m not referring to the retail chain that makes the best frozen drink known to mankind. Nothing so sweet, unfortunately. What I’m referring to is the Rule of 7-11, which is well known to financial analysts around the world. What it basically says is that a sum of money will double in size in 11 years if it earns interest at the rate of seven percent per year. Similarly, a sum of money will double in size in seven years if it earns interest at the rate of 11 percent per year. So how does this relate to Gen Y and whether they’re community focused and not primarily motivated by money or whether they hop from job-to-job whenever the employer across the street offers them even the most modest of pay increases? Everything.
Gen Y does work to live rather than live to work. They are more community focused than any generation since the GI Generation a/k/a Beat Generation — those who were young adults during World War II. So if Gen Y wants to work for environmentally conscious companies which believe in transparency and they want a good work-life balance, why do they job hop? Because of the Rule of 7-11. The cost of college tuition is increasing at double digit rates year-after-year, so the cost to attend college is doubling very, very quickly. If the cost of attending a specific college increases at the rate of 11 percent per year, which has been pretty normal for the past couple of decades, then the cost of attending that college doubles every seven years.
Gen X’ers like me who attended college two decades ago received our education for far less money than Gen Y’ers are paying. I paid $3,500 for tuition my last year in school. If the cost of that tuition were to double every seven years, that means that today’s student in that same program would pay $28,000. That’s disgusting. I graduated with about $20,000 in student loan debt. A Gen Y’er following in my footsteps would graduate with $160,000 in student loan debt. Folks, this generation is being swallowed by the debt that we’re allowing out-of-control higher education institutions to inflict. Gen Y job hops not because they want to and not because they don’t realize the problems that it creates for their employers and for themselves, but because they have to.
College Board surveys indicate that about 40 percent of unmarried students under the age of 25 are working for pay more than 20 hours a week will enrolled in full-time post-secondary programs. The American Council on Education, Washington regards that number of work hours as hazardous as it is linked to falling grades and higher dropout rates. The average debt load upon graduation has rise to almost $20,000, which is about double what it was a decade ago. In addition to student loan debt increasing consistent with the Rule of 7-11, so are private loans and credit card debt. And the burden isn’t only falling on today’s students. Their parents are also paying for the inability of colleges and universities to keep the prices they charge their customers under control. According to Academic Management Services, parents are paying more than their children for the college expenses of those children.
Employers who are frustrated by losing members of Gen Y to jobs offering slightly higher pay should stop blaming Gen Y and instead start exerting pressure on this country’s colleges and universities to make post-secondary education affordable again. And by affordable I don’t mean making more debt easier to obtain. I mean rolling back tuition rates. I mean pressuring the schools to restrict their tuition increases to the rate of inflation or, better yet, less than the rate of inflation. I mean implementing programs like the military does under which you agree to pay for part or even all of the student loans incurred by your employees if they work for you for a certain number of years. We need to stop complaining about the problem and start helping this generation or we’ll end up with the most disillusioned and frustrated generation ever rather than the most community focused generation in six decades.