The Millennial Muddle
Kids these days. Just look at them. They've got those headphones in their ears and a gadget in every hand. They speak in tongues and text in code. They wear flip-flops everywhere. Does anyone really understand them?
Only some people do, or so it seems. They are experts who have earned advanced degrees, dissected data, and published books. If the minds of college students are a maze, these specialists sell maps...
... Everyone in higher education has pondered "the Millennials," people born between 1982 and 2004 or thereabouts (the years themselves are a subject of debate). Ever since the term went prime time about a decade ago, a zillion words have been written about who Millennials are, how they think, and why they always _______________. In short, Millennials talk is contagious.
Those who have shaped the nation's understanding of young people are not nearly as famous as their subjects, however. That's a shame, for these experts are colorful characters in their own right. Some are scholars, and some aren't. Many can recall watching the Beatles on a black-and-white television, and some grew up just before Barney the purple dinosaur arrived. Most can entertain an audience, though a few prefer to comb through statistics...
... Criticizing the young is inevitable, but so, too, is change. In 2000, Neil Howe and William Strauss published Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, which cast turn-of-the-century teenagers as rule followers who were engaged, optimistic, and downright pleasant. The authors assigned them seven "core traits": special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving. These conclusions were based on a hodgepodge of anecdotes, statistics, and pop-culture references, as well as on surveys of teachers and about 600 high-school seniors in Fairfax County, Va., which in 2007 became the first county in the nation to have a median household income of more than $100,000, about twice the national average.
The authors made a sweeping prediction. "This generation is going to rebel by behaving not worse, but better," they wrote of Millennials, a term they had coined. "Their life mission will not be to tear down old institutions that don't work, but to build up new ones that do." Such thinking promised to give educators, not to mention tens of millions of parents, a warm feeling. Who wouldn't want to hear that their kids are special?...
Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education
Only some people do, or so it seems. They are experts who have earned advanced degrees, dissected data, and published books. If the minds of college students are a maze, these specialists sell maps...
... Everyone in higher education has pondered "the Millennials," people born between 1982 and 2004 or thereabouts (the years themselves are a subject of debate). Ever since the term went prime time about a decade ago, a zillion words have been written about who Millennials are, how they think, and why they always _______________. In short, Millennials talk is contagious.
Those who have shaped the nation's understanding of young people are not nearly as famous as their subjects, however. That's a shame, for these experts are colorful characters in their own right. Some are scholars, and some aren't. Many can recall watching the Beatles on a black-and-white television, and some grew up just before Barney the purple dinosaur arrived. Most can entertain an audience, though a few prefer to comb through statistics...
... Criticizing the young is inevitable, but so, too, is change. In 2000, Neil Howe and William Strauss published Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, which cast turn-of-the-century teenagers as rule followers who were engaged, optimistic, and downright pleasant. The authors assigned them seven "core traits": special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving. These conclusions were based on a hodgepodge of anecdotes, statistics, and pop-culture references, as well as on surveys of teachers and about 600 high-school seniors in Fairfax County, Va., which in 2007 became the first county in the nation to have a median household income of more than $100,000, about twice the national average.
The authors made a sweeping prediction. "This generation is going to rebel by behaving not worse, but better," they wrote of Millennials, a term they had coined. "Their life mission will not be to tear down old institutions that don't work, but to build up new ones that do." Such thinking promised to give educators, not to mention tens of millions of parents, a warm feeling. Who wouldn't want to hear that their kids are special?...