In the midst of the inescapable parental experiences of changing a particularly messy diaper or of trying to comfort a squalling child with an ear infection in the middle of the night, there may be no parent who does not silently yearn for the serenity of the empty nest after the long slog of child rearing comes to a close.
The news from the empty nest is: get real, it ain’t over.
College admission, if your child is so inclined, is a huge step out of the nest, but comes with its own set of parent-child anxieties: test score results, class rank and extra curricular activities balance. But wherever they go, the American system of higher education is so sterling that your Jack or Jill can hardly go wrong. The only variable is the amount of money you are willing to invest to accommodate their desired social environment—usually a code for prestige.
But then, sooner than they—not you—think possible, they are finally out in the world. Halleluiah, you think, they are on their own. Dream on.
What no one told you is that the step between your child’s last day in a classroom and the first day at a real job now requires them to cross another heavily fortified boundary across an indeterminate width of no man’s land. We must recognize that the American job market will probably never again be what it was like when boomer parents entered the labor force in the 1970s and 80s. Back then you were expected to go to India, or at least California; or to spend two years at sea, preferably as a deck hand on a tramp steamer in Malaysia or some other remote location letting your education slowly marinate in an exotic stew. When you got back, you began to look for “meaningful” work, and lightly discarded those mundane options you deemed insufficiently adapted to your unique skills and catholic interests.
Today’s Generation Xrs and Yrs are much less persnickety because for the past four-to-five years, the job front for inexperienced graduates has been exceptionally bleak. Kids have moved back to their parents’ empty nests for long layovers, like migratory birds storing up fat for their flights that get repeatedly postponed. Up go your household expenses, down goes your patience. College taught few of them to turn down the thermostat at night. Or to fill the gas tank of a borrowed car. A few undergraduates learned to do their laundry, but mostly they left this chore for a home visit during college break time, the length of which you learned is a function of the cost of college: the higher the cost of tuition, the more and longer the breaks. Year by year, it became more discouraging to do the math.
2007 is the last year I can recall a robust job market for young college graduates. Our first-born decided to leave a perfectly good job in Manhattan in order to join his sweetheart in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, he called in a mild panic and said, “Dad, I’ve been here two weeks and no one has offered me a job yet.” I told him the world is a tough place and he just had to hang in there. In two more weeks he had three offers. True story. Of course, as a computer game designer in Oz-land, he understood he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
But for the next four sons, all liberal arts majors of one flavor or another, the job market just kept getting worse and worse for them after they watched their brother catch, what looked like to them, the last train out of town. One went on to get a graduate degree in architecture and entered the job market just as the housing and construction industries entered the Great Recession. The closest he got to architecture was working for a pair of Bay Area architects who hired him and a classmate to reconstruct their historic wooden yacht. Let us just say it was another learning experience, after which they bought an 18-foot Hobie Cat, which they planned to sail from Key West to Maine. Neither of them had sailed before. Another learning process, with indelible lessons gained from sharing 90 square feet of boat space during100 days at sea, including weathering three serious storms and a hurricane, and ending when they finally tied up at the 79th Street boat basin in Manhattan, tired, broke and jobless.
The most organized of the five brothers took his liberal arts degree and got a job with a financial research company in New York after being turned down by the same and finding a fluke opening listed in another of the firm’s offices on Craig’s List. Voila! But New York City financial jobs are not all they are cracked up to be these days, since their starting salaries now require serious extraterrestrial support from the mother ship. The starting point in the job market for the other two brothers were unpaid internships, one of which, in New Orleans, required the use of his car, which was like having to pay to work. The other couch surfed in Washington for almost half a year of his unpaid internship with a financially disorganized non-profit, during which he left a permanent indentation in every friend’s furniture who had opened their door, until the non-profit finally offered him a modest fellowship. God bless them all.
All of these characters are now contemplating their next tentative job moves, except for the oldest, who shook off the golden handcuffs of his previous computer game design company to go to work”¦for himself! At no pay! And he’s the only one with a science, not a liberal arts, degree. The one with the fellowship is now considering getting some technical training in database management and computer mapping. “Why didn’t you make me take geographic information systems (G.I.S.) courses when I was in college?” he asked me. “When did you ever ask me for advice on your course selection when you were in college?” I asked him.
The moral of this story, if there is one, is that the nest is (thankfully) never empty. If the job market continues to look as bleak as it has for the past half decade, there might be fewer empty nesters and also many fewer liberal arts degrees awarded in the future. Whether this is good or bad is, of course, hard to say. I am comforted to know that my five recently fledged tercels all can think for themselves, supposedly the hallmark of a good education. But if my experience is in anyway typical, the premium on practical knowledge is likely to increase in the future.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.