Despite graduating from college only a few months after the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, I never really realized what that meant. Over the past week, I've realized.
I remember September of my senior year at Brown, when the banks failed, Lehman Brothers failed, and the auto companies failed. I called my mom in a daze, asking what it all meant. What had happened? Did I need to worry? What was a subprime loan anyway? She said I probably didn't need to worry, so I left it at that. I knew that unemployment was skyrocketing--Lehman Brothers and the other investment banking firms no longer recruited my friends at Brown. Some of the "lucky" ones who had already landed jobs at Lehman had the offers rescinded. But it was early in our senior year and we were at a top-notch school, so I was pretty sure we'd all be okay. Sure, most of us (me included) gave up the fruitless and frustrating job search in favor of graduate school, but at least in my case, that turned out to be exactly the right decision.
And then graduate school was a lovely bubble that seemed nearly unaffected by the economic crash. At least, I didn't know any different. Supposedly there were fewer Master's project offerings, as companies couldn't afford to oversee student consultants for an entire year. But, hey, I found a great project that would fly me to Madagascar, and we landed enough grant money to pay our way!
And then, come April 2011, I graduated again and was one of the lucky ones to have secured not one but two job offers. Again, no real impacts here. I could see from the statistics put out by SNRE that average starting salaries of the graduating class had dropped over the past couple years, but even that lower salary was more than I had ever made before, so that's cool, right?
That brings me to this last week, when things started to hit home. First, one of my projects at work had me compiling data on unemployment and poverty rates in six states and twenty American Indian reservations in the southwest. I started by looking up 2010 Census numbers. It didn't mean anything--ten percent unemployment is normal, right? But then I discovered that Tribal data wasn't available for 2010 and I'd have to report 2000 data for the project instead. I started typing those numbers into my table, and -- whoa. Unemployment used to be FOUR percent? That's, like, so low. I couldn't believe how many of these geographic areas had seen unemployment and poverty rates double or triple over the last decade. I was stunned. I suddenly felt very lucky to be sitting at my desk.
The second moment that the recession hit home happened over brunch with a friend from graduate school. We were sharing updates on how mutual friends were doing, and it seemed that every person we talked about was either underemployed and actively looking for a way out, unemployed and "making the best of it" by volunteering abroad, living with parents, etc, or only semi-happily employed. When I started thinking about it, I couldn't come up with one friend from SNRE who is in a job they consider their career.
I don't know what this means. There are so many possible explanations, one being that recent generations have seen a shift toward people changing jobs several times throughout their lives. Maybe my generation just doesn't see the need to pick one career. Or maybe we're too slow to grow up, as countless editorials have claimed--we cling to our parents into our twenties, and while they were probably married with kids by our age, we're traveling the world trying to "find ourselves."
Or maybe the economy just stinks. Even if you graduate from one of the top three graduate schools in environmental studies (SNRE, Duke, and Yale, with UC-Santa Barbara hanging out somewhere up top, too). Even if you are brilliant and motivated with fantastic references. Even if you apply to 20 or 50 or more jobs. Maybe the jobs just aren't there. I hear so often that I picked a great field, one of the only fields growing in this recession. Now I wonder if that's true. Certainly, people are more aware of environmental issues than they were a decade ago, but there is no federal energy policy, no serious climate negotiation, no interest in high speed rail, no state or local funding to do anything more than proffer hand-waving goals.
One little bright spot, as we stare into the blank future ahead wondering when things get better, is that, as my friend so aptly put it, "environmental people tend to be cool." Wherever we all end up, whatever we're doing, we'll at least be in the company of easygoing, inspired, cool people.
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