Millenials feel more pressure to compete than their elders did, but they are better at find a ... [+]
This week, publications from The New York Times to The Guardian have placed the phrase “OK Boomer,” and with it the tensions between Boomers and Millennials, under the spotlight. I have been researching Millennials and Generation Z for a few years now. I have noticed a pattern in us Boomers and Generation X: we delight in making fun of what Millennials and Generation Z want when we first hear about it. Think: flexible work hours, working from a coffee shop or another remote location, having a voice in important decisions, reshaping the hierarchy, and more. Our mockery can make for good fun over a drink, yet it seems almost inevitable that a year later we realize that we want the same things as our younger counterparts.
The Decline but Not Fall of Hierarchy — What Young People Really WantFORBES Karl Moore
I’m sure you’ve done it, too; it is almost irresistible. And with people our own generation it’s easy to get a good laugh out of “young people today!” As a professor at a university I am unusually engaged with young people, some 19- but mostly 20- and 21- year-olds. I not only teach them but currently have 9 students working for or with me part-time. I have a young work force and yet as a Boomer I am older than the average reader.
I had an epiphany just last week. My undergraduate students wrote a paper on the morphing of globalization for the advanced strategy class that I co-teach. The papers were well written, but that was no surprise. The McGill Management School undergraduate program is the hardest to get into in Canada and as a result we see very bright undergraduate students, not just from Canada but around the world. Out of the 50 or so papers that I read, a handful of them were particularly outstanding, so I asked their authors via email if they could present their analyses in class 3 days later. I emailed them on a Saturday, asking for a presentation the coming Tuesday. I meant it as a considerable compliment to the quality and originality of their paper and when I started teaching at Oxford 25 years ago or even at McGill 10 years ago, the answer would have been an unequivocal ‘yes.’
How 1999! To my surprise, several of the students answered that they could not deliver because they were swamped with other assignments and a couple said that they were wrestling with mental health issues. This caught me by surprise. I have attended sessions by experts on how McGill students and students at other elite schools in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere around the world feel more pressure to perform than when I was in school and even a mere decade ago. Back in the day, the aspiring MBB consultants or I-Bankers would just suck it up, as they would have in their summer jobs and would go on to do in their full-time work after graduation. Not so today.
One of our great students Lisandro Quintero Monsalve, suggested a couple of reasons why students are so stressed today. First of all, today "a master’s is the new bachelor’s degree.” This degree inflation makes students too, at times, focused on grades, because they are often a key component to getting into the ‘right’ graduate program. Secondly, globalization is evolving in new directions, and regardless of the isolationism manifested by Brexit, President Trump, and China one of the key impacts on students is that they no longer compete just with students from their own country but from many countries around the world, which has also ratcheted up the competition they face, for graduate school and for careers.
But rather than making fun of my students’ forthrightness, I decided to skip that part and instead recognize that they are right. Like them, I should be less willing to throw myself into endless work just to please some perceived authority figure as I have done so often in my career. Work-life integration is important and a something to think about when we consider work requests such as the one that I made of them. While they are young and have a lot left to learn about the professional world, they proved that in this case they are wiser than me: there is no glamour in excess sacrificing of our personal needs for academic or professional demands. As Boomers we could all stand to move past our mockery and recognize the value of being reverse mentored by Generation Zs.
Marie Labrosse, a master’s student in English Literature at McGill University, contributed to this piece.
