The Magna Cum Laude Recession
It’s a funny thing, newspapering. Last Saturday, for example, the Washington Post carried a dour dispatch in its business pages announcing that the DC unemployment rate ticked up another half a percentage point in October. This was “its highest level in 34 years of record keeping,” noted reporter V. Dion Haynes. While the 11.9% jobless rate is in line with that of other major cities, there’s also a peculiar lag in the employment scene here; even though employers in metro DC have added 10,200 jobs in the more credentialed end of the service industries, such as education and health care, they make a poor match for the District’s labor market. Citing the work of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, Haynes notes that “the District has a higher proportion of undereducated, low-skilled people who have been most vulnerable to job cuts,” and so it stands to reason that “many of the new, higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs in the city are going to people in the suburbs” of Maryland and Virginia. Eagle-eyed readers of the Post business section might recall a similarly underplayed story from earlier this month, which found that DC’s rarely functional government has been stoking this urban skills gap by failing to direct recipients of welfare assistance to programs upgrading job skills and offering counsel on job search strategies-even though such referrals are more or less mandatory under federal law.
But that’s all just the unremarkable daily grist of recession coverage in a city long besieged by stubbornly persistent poverty and contending with a long-frayed patchwork of public assistance resources: Poor people staying poor, with future prospects shimmering into mirage-like visions of marginal improvement. And that, in turn, is why you see precious little local reporting in the Post’s “Coping with the Recession” package, a months-long series tracking national downward-tending economic trends, which has plainly been sent packing across its many appointed column inches with a decal on its luggage that reads: “Destination Pulitzer.” The previous big-picture installment in the series, after all, concerned a recently divorced credit-card executive who is “squeaking by on $300,00 a year.”
So the day after the A-11 Saturday news about worsening low-skill joblessness, readers of this Sunday’s paper were greeted on its front page by a very different face of the recession’s jobless ranks: Melissa Meyer, a 23-year-old magna cum laude graduate of George Washington University who has been living with her parents in Missoula, Mont., as she rethinks her long-term career prospects.
Now, there is no doubt that this is indeed a newsworthy trend: No one matriculates as a business and marketing major, as Meyer did, with the expectation of bunking in her old bedroom back at the family home. That’s especially the case at a school like GWU-routinely ranked among the most expensive in the nation-where students have every reason to hope that they will follow in the cushioned, entitled footsteps of celebrated alums like Jackie Onassis.
But what’s surpassingly odd about Post reporter Eli Saslow’s blowout portrait of Meyer’s job travails is that Meyers’ downward spiral in the labor market leaves us with much the same moral that the grubbier news bubbling up from the low-wage, low-skill sectors of the economy does: Even high-achieving candidates like Meyer are being groomed for positions that simply aren’t there. Not only was she stiffed by a sexy New Economy Seattle firm that had instituted a hiring freeze and (what seems infinitely more ominous) shuttered the employee wine bar; she’s also put through the demoralizing, bewildering ordeal of putting in for jobs she has no formal training to qualify for.
In one central vignette, for instance, she attends an orientation session for applicants for three part-time substitute teaching slots in the Missoula public school system. As Saslow notes, Meyer “has never taught before, nor does she particularly enjoy children, but she has been turned down by a restaurant, a bakery and an herbal shop during the past two weeks.” Seventy-five people have turned out for the event, and Meyer is clearly the odd one out-six are certified assistant teachers, many others have education degrees, and almost everyone but her at least has a bachelors degree in English, science, or some other field taught in public schools.
All the jobs counselor can suggest for her is to hand out business cards at her high school alma mater, in the hope that “the staff will help out a former valedictorian by requesting her as a substitute.”
To her credit, Meyer, who clearly deserved her many academic honors, draws a bracingly noncomformist lesson from such encounters. “Why waste my time continuing to apply for jobs that don’t want me?” Better by far, she confides to her boyfriend, a local rafting instructor, to pick up and travel-perhaps to a Nepalese yoga ashram, or a New Zealand vineyard. “I don’t want to look back after 30 years in a cubicle and think, ‘I should have….’”
That, of course, is an option that can only occur to someone who has something more than the safety net of poorly administered public-sector job training programs to fall back on. For all the psychic pain of graduating into a job-starved economy, after all, it’s still far easier to list downward from the commanding heights of credentialed privilege than to burrow upward from the depths of an urban service economy pocked with fearsome skill mismatches that favor outer-ring suburbanites. Odds are that DC’s majority-black industrial reserve army, disproportionately concentrated in Southeast DC’s Ward 8, where joblessness is now more than 30%, won’t be scheduling all that many ashram getaways-and that, it seems, is what it would take for its members to draw the attention of the Post’s economic features team.
Chris Lehmann changes a mean roll of toilet paper himself, if you’d like to hire him to do so. (Kidding! HE WOULD NEVER. Probably.)