From Salon: http://www.salon.com/2013/12/05/guess_what_elites_not_all_young_people_are_rich/
Addressing the concerns of today’s youth is impossible if you think the only issues are those ailing the privileged
Matthew Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker
Thursday, Dec 5, 2013
Writing about entire generations of people is usually a pretty ill-fated idea. Any given age group contains a snapshot of basically all of the diversity there is in the country: class, race, gender, sexuality, education and so on. The notion that all of these individuals have a great deal in common owing to their age is preposterous. In reality, so-called generational think pieces are never really about entire generations; rather, they are about the plight of the well-off individuals within specific generations.
Interestingly, this unfortunate conflation holds for writers coming from both the left and the right. So, when it comes to discussing the youth of the day, right-wing writers describe their hardships as being derivative of the fact that their parents are so luxuriously wealthy that the lazy kids never want to move out and start their own lives. On the other hand, left-wing writers describe the hardships of youth as synonymous with the issues facing the small minority of youth that manage to get four-year college degrees, issues that these writers like to remind us “our parents” did not face when they went to college.
In both cases, it is the assumed parents of the youth in question that alerts us as to who it is these writers have in mind when they speak of the younger generation. Most youths do not have rich parents with houses featuring “four-car garages, master suites, and cathedral ceilings” that they just cannot bear to leave. And most parents of today’s youth do not have any college degree, let alone one from a four-year university. Youths that have parents with fancy houses or college degrees are the clear minority, but, as always, it is the well-off and the elite that stand in for the whole, and the shadow they cast envelops and erases the rest.
Since coverage of the younger generation is actually coverage of the well-off younger generation — those from affluent backgrounds, those who managed to make it to college, those with graduate degrees — we know by now what their issues are. The rise of part-time adjunct faculty, the supermajority of whom say they want to be part-time, is apparently a big youth issue, at least for those down and out enough to have a Ph.D. And of course, the meteoric rise of university tuition is a big youth issue, except for the poor youth who go to community college (where tuition has been falling), those from the poorest quarter of families who haven’t seen a tuition increase at public universities since 1992, and the majority of youth who do not go to universities at all.
Continue reading at: http://www.salon.com/2013/12/05/guess_what_elites_not_all_young_people_are_rich/
