Tag Archives: millennials

Data on millennials’ life-long take on Osama Bin Laden

Posted on by

In an op-ed, a millennial considers some data regarding how the younger generation viewed Osama Bin Laden throughout their lives. While the media has suggested Bin Laden was a key figure in their young lives, this commentator suggests the data regarding his generation’s view of Bin Laden is more mixed:

Let’s start with the media’s attempts to establish Bin Laden’s impact on millennials. In addition to student sound bites and expert testimony, newspapers turned to sociological evidence to support their theories. To show how 9/11 inspired millennials to pursue public service, USA Today cited the increase in applications for nonprofit jobs. (The week before, this would have been proof of our struggling economy.) To show how 9/11 left millennials in a state of perpetual distress, the newspaper cited a Pew survey claiming that 83% of young people sleep with their cellphones on. (The week before, this would have been proof of our declining attention spans.)

Notice what USA Today didn’t cite: data on millennials’ opinions of Bin Laden from before his death. That’s because these data don’t support the narrative of a generation defining itself in the shadow of the Twin Towers. Not too long ago, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation ran a series of focus groups on college students’ attitudes toward 9/11. The foundation asked students to name the most important social or political event of their lifetime. The most common answer was not 9/11 — in fact, it was one of the least common — but the rise of the Internet.

Even data that support the media’s theories stop well short of suggesting a millennial reboot. In 2000, for example, UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute reported that the number of freshmen who considered keeping up with political affairs to be “essential” or “very important” hit an election-year low: 28%. After 9/11, that number did bounce back — but only to 39% in 2008, well below the 60%-plus who answered affirmatively in 1966, the first year of the annual poll.

These statistics, I think, capture my generation’s real relationship to Bin Laden. It would be too much to say we had forgotten about him, but it also would be too much to say he haunted or defined us in any real way.

I, too, have heard this media narrative and now that I think about it, the primary data marshaled in support of it were the college student celebrations the night of the announcement of Bin Laden’s death. I would need to see more data on this to be convinced either way but it sounds like an interesting argument. If the media story is incorrect, it seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to put together more data to suggest this is the case. I assume most polling organizations have asked plenty of questions about Bin Laden and terrorism over the last ten years and these organizations could easily break out the data by age. If it turned out that millennials were not terribly impacted by 9/11 or Bin Laden’s death, what would be the reaction of older generations?

The rest of the op-ed contains opinions about the partying reaction of millennials. The public discussion regarding the celebration of and reaction to Bin Laden’s death has been intriguing though it is hard to know exactly what is going on and what it might say, if anything, about the larger American culture. My initial reaction to seeing the college students partying in front of the White House was to think that they were looking for an excuse to party on a Sunday night with school the next day…

A sociologist argues younger generation need self-help messages

Posted on by

After researching self-help books, a sociologist argues that Millennials need the messages of classic self-help books in order to navigate modern relationships:

When assistant professor of sociology Christine Whelan, 33, set out to study the rise of the self-help industry ten years ago, she was skeptical. But after reading hundreds of books, writing her doctoral dissertation on the subject at Oxford, and then teaching more than 400 students, Whelan, now at the University of Pittsburgh, realized that several self-help classics had a lot to teach a generation of people who are expert at texting and other sorts of online communication, but ill-schooled in the art of face-to-face communication and self-presentation…

Whelan got the idea to start teaching self-help classes, which she framed as the sociology of self-improvement. She was surprised to discover how eager her students were to absorb the lessons taught in books like Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People, first released in 1937, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled from 1978 and Stephen Covey’s 1989 The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. “They were raised in a therapeutic culture,” she notes. “That separates this generation of job-seekers from others.”…

After putting hundreds of students through her course, Whelan says she came up with some lessons that combine 20th century common sense with 21st century lives. She combined them into a new self-help book aimed at Millennials, Generation WTF. I asked her to boil down the points most salient to job seekers, and illustrate them with some anecdotes. Notes Whelan, “nothing in this is rocket science. But it’s new to them and it works.”

The six steps that are then laid out seem fairly obvious but perhaps Whelan is right about the need to teach this material. There does seem to be a lot of articles floating around these days that talk about the crazy things that people interviewing for jobs do.

So what exactly goes on in a “sociology of self-improvement” class? While it sounds odd when you first hear about it, it could end up being an interesting course about human interaction. I wonder if there is any critique of the self-help movement.

Unemployment and the millennials

Posted on by

The New York Times reprints some unemployment figures:

For young adults, the prospects in the workplace, even for the college-educated, have rarely been so bleak. Apart from the 14 percent who are unemployed and seeking work…23 percent are not even seeking a job, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total, 37 percent, is the highest in more than three decades and a rate reminiscent of the 1930s.

…and fleshes out those figures with the anecdote of Scott Nicholson, a 2008 college graduate who is still looking for work:

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter — four or five a week, week after week.

I think what makes this story so interesting is its intergenerational comparison of Scott, his father, and his grandfather and the opportunities available to each.  Louis Uchitelle makes a strong case that fundamental opportunities have shifted, that the millennials’ equivalent of “go West, young man” means leaving the U.S.–and its moribund economy–entirely.