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Editor's note: In the cover story of our May 3 print edition, ADVANCE reported on the defining characteristics of the millennials. This Web- exclusive article examines the events and trends that shaped today's newest generation of workers.
Who are the millennials? What is so new and different about the latest generation that initially caused Paige Shaughnessy, PhD, CCC-SLP, to playfully refer to them as "Martians"?
"When I first started getting students at the graduate school and college level, they seemed to be speaking a different language attitudinally, behaviorally and linguistically," recounted Dr. Shaughnessy, graduate program director in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, School of Allied Health Professions, at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, CA.
Millennials earned their name because they began maturing into young adults at the turn of the millennium. Like previous generations, they have faced their own unique set of challenges and cultural shifts, from "helicopter parents" and a persistent focus on achievement to terrorism. A combination of trends and events has influenced how millennials live their lives and perceive the world.
One of the most pervasive trends in America is to see the world as a scary place, which Dr. Shaughnessy attributes to visual media. "You can see the violence that is happening right now," she said. "It seems like there is evidence all around us."
Terrorism is the biggest contributor to the climate of fear, which was propelled by the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. This generation is old enough to remember the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the Centennial Olympic Park bombing during the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996. More recently, there have been the "shoe bomber" in 2001 and the Christmas Day bomber in 2009.
"Terrorism in the United States is something no other generation was ever faced with," said Dr. Shaughnessy. "It's terror. It makes them afraid."
Millennials also are all too familiar with violence in high schools and on college campuses. For some, memories of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 and the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 are vivid memories. Since 2001, the United States has been engaged in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and some millennials are already veterans two, three or four times over.
This generation has grown up reading about and reacting to scandals involving President Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, and child abuse in the Catholic Church. They have witnessed natural disasters like the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Haiti Earthquake earlier this year. "These have some sort of fall-out," Dr. Shaughnessy said. "Sometimes we're not able to deal with them well."
The greatest expansion of the U.S. economy in 100 years began in the 1980s, followed by the dot-com bust in the 1990s. The current economic climate leaves many bracing for an uncertain future.
"The United States is no longer on top economically," she said. "What does that mean for us in the future? The inflation of education costs and the instability of our workforce lead to the notion of an uncertain future. As millennials begin to get graduate degrees and enter the workforce, we have a declining U.S. economy in the whole first decade of the 21st century."
The "college experience" of having fun for the first two years, shaping up for the last two years, graduating, and getting a career will soon be a thing of the past, Dr. Shaughnessy predicted. Furthermore, it's harder to get student loans while the cost of education escalates.
When former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo announced in 1988 that the next 10 years would be known as the "Decade of the Child," the country took the phrase and ran with it,2 Dr. Shaughnessy said. "Our focus became how great it is to have babies and children. So we pampered them. And because the world is a scary place, we made them have play dates instead of going out in the woods and playing and coming home late and dirty. We scheduled their whole lives."
Parents became more protective. They hovered around their children, keeping a close eye on their every move and often intervening on their behalf in stressful situations. Labeled "helicopter parents," they scheduled everything in their child's life, limiting free play and, in the process, creativity. This dearth of experimentation with the environment, along with a lack of time for reflective thinking, created a generation of concrete thinkers.
"When your whole life is scheduled and you don't have to think for yourself, you don't have to think deeply," she said. "We also have created students who are very self-absorbed. We made it all about them, so it is all about them."
That leads to a trend involving self-esteem. Today's students have higher scores on tests of self-esteem than any generation before them, yet they may not have the skills needed to survive.
"The fall-out from all that parent advocacy is that students have a sense of entitlement," Dr. Shaughnessy said. "This is the mantra they've heard: 'I'm a good person; I deserve the best.'"
From a very young age millennials have been hammered with proclamations about the need to go to college in order to get anywhere in life. In the classroom they have always been more concerned about passing an exam than actually learning the material.
"They ask, 'What's my grade? How many points do I get?'" she said. "Along with that we have experienced a trend in grade inflation. What is now an A used to be a C. Therefore, we're doing remedial math and writing at the college level."
Today's college students don't know how to compete. They grew up thinking that everyone is a winner, regardless of performance. When they lose, they fall apart. Some even have the idea that they don't have to work for what they get.
Immigration has impacted the latest generation as well. Many millennials have parents who are biracial or from different cultures. As a result, "this generation is more tolerant," Dr. Shaughnessy said. "They don't want to be classified by race, gender or political orientation-they just don't want to be classified. They have a greater tolerance for others in general."
The biggest event to shape the new generation was the advent of the personal computer in 1984, just as millennials were coming into the world. That was followed by the Internet. "The digital world provides them with unlimited choices," she said. So does the real world, where they must learn to choose wisely.
"We are in error if we expect the millennials to do this on their own," Dr. Shaughnessy said. "It seems to me that it is the duty of our older, more experienced generations to give the tools that will help them survive."
References
1. Mosheim, J. (2010). Make Way for the Millennials: Welcoming a new generation. ADVANCE, 20 (9): 6-9.
2. Decade of the Child: A modest start. (1988). The New York Times. Accessed via http://www.nytimes.com/.
Jason Mosheim is a Senior Associate Editor at ADVANCE. He can be contacted at jmosheim@advanceweb.com.
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