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NYTIMES: There are no second chances

HAHAURFUCKED We in America believe in starting over — and...
Impertinent diverse hospital reading party
  06/25/18
...
sick citrine prole
  06/25/18
She'd rather flush $16,000 in sunk costs down the toilet tha...
odious macaca
  06/25/18
Maybe she broke both of her index fingers
Milky library dysfunction
  06/25/18
...
sick citrine prole
  06/25/18
...
Vivacious Useless Brakes Senate
  06/25/18
“When I last spoke to her, she and her family owed $16,000 i...
Vivacious Useless Brakes Senate
  06/25/18
...
Flatulent very tactful parlour
  07/17/18


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Date: June 25th, 2018 12:50 PM
Author: Impertinent diverse hospital reading party

HAHAURFUCKED

We in America believe in starting over — and over and over.

Take Sheri, who was a 47-year-old stay-at-home mom when I spoke with her. In her previous job as a customer support representative at a hospital, the Massachusetts mother of three spent her time paging doctors and in return made a very modest hourly wage. But in midlife, she decided to retrain in the hopes of making a better salary to help cover her kids’ college tuition. She said that she was easily lured by the promises of a for-profit college offering an advanced degree in health care management.

“They sucked me in, telling me I could study in my own time, when my kids were asleep,” Sheri told me. “They said that I didn’t have to pay money up front. It was very appealing.” That all changed when she got an injury halfway through the program and could no longer use her computer keyboard to type her papers. The school administration told her she would have to drop out and reregister. The school wouldn’t apply her credits or the money she had already spent to future course work. So she left.

When I last spoke to her, she and her family owed $16,000 in student loans.

Over the past few years, I’ve spoken to a number of middle-aged people who, like Sheri, retrained in midlife and accrued new student debt. Some started their attempt at a professional upgrade after taking a pause from the work force to have kids — a story so familiar to many of us that it could serve as an omnipresent soundtrack. One middle-aged father of four went back to school to study tech. His degree from the ITT Technical Institute, a for-profit college that is now defunct, left him $59,000 in debt and employed at close to the same earning capacity he was before he started the program.

I call the businesses propelling that promise of reinvention the “second-act industry,” and it includes for-profit universities, certificate programs and coaches getting in on the new trend — all of them helping, for a fee, people who are trying to get back into or ahead in the work force. Indeed, some of these schools were even tied to our president, like the troublesome for-profit Trump University, which separated many hard-up aspirants from their money (and was later sued and settled).

The idea behind the second-act industry is that it’s never too late; you’re never too old.

The industry appeals to anxious and sometimes underqualified middle-aged students who are enticed by a constellation of websites, special programs, self-help books and gurus. Ann Rankowitz, the founder of Second Act Coaching, promises, “Your own second act can actually be the most exciting, freeing and empowered era of your life.”

At the very high end, some companies guide professionals age 50-plus on their second act to the tune of $20,000 to $90,000 a year, counseling them on how to present themselves to new employers. One such coach calls himself a “career designer.” There are virtual conferences with names like Mega Reinvention and Age Busters Power Summit. Websites assure us that “by learning the essential ways to focus on your added value, you can turn your age into an advantage.”

Generally, for-profit schools and coaches targeting unemployed and underemployed older workers are marketed for maximum revenue. “They inflate the promise of what you might get from all of these training workshops, books, coaching or schools,” said Ofer Sharone, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sociologist and a founder of the Institute for Career Transitions.

All of these training programs can wind up creating more student debt for the middle-aged. At least 17 percent of the $1.4 trillion in outstanding student loan debt belongs to people over 50 years old. People 60 and older are the fastest growing age segment of the student loan market.

Though much of that debt went to education for children and grandchildren, a significant percentage of people were paying for their own education — their attempts to “reboot.”

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According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 33.5 percent of job-seekers age 55 and older are long-term unemployed people, and long-term unemployment rates for people over 55 are triple the rates for those 25 and under.

There is a psychological and physical toll from the pressure to recreate ourselves in midlife. To survive as workers, we have to deny, on some level, the realities of our bodies — bodies that age and give birth. While more people are working later in life because of happy things like longer life expectancy, they are also doing so because of very sad things, like a lack of Social Security benefits or retirement plans.

“The big picture in our economy is that people are in increasingly precarious situations, so they have to have a second act or a third act — this includes the upper-middle class,” said Professor Sharone. But the rosily optimistic narrative the second-act industry poses is a story that appeals to many of us as we age, partly because if we can’t start over, we may not be able to take care of our families or ourselves.

It is also a story, though, that hews to a troubling belief in human perfectibility: a national makeover mentality about identity. It is one prong of the way American parents and aging workers are being squeezed, and how we have been taught to seek only individual solutions for problems that are often collective or systemic in nature.

The real problem is that middle-aged people are unlikely to have pensions or savings because of inadequate federal social support in this country. Unfortunately, individual ambition — midlife “leaning in” — doesn’t always do the trick.

Yet we continue to believe. Perhaps it’s because the roots of our faith in second acts are long. F. Scott Fitzgerald was just one of the many novelists who had trust in it, writing, “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.”

It doesn’t always work that way. And people blame themselves for their unemployment and for accruing debt after trying for a career, when attempts at reinvention have led them to a proverbial hall of mirrors.

So instead of putting the blame on people caught in this bind, what if we had better anti-ageist work policies? What if companies were incentivized to hire older workers? And what if middle-aged people who are casting about for a second act had real societal support while they did so, like free after-school programs for their children or a monthly basic income guarantee, like the one now being piloted in Ontario?

The lack of a safety net that sometimes forces people into these second-act “solutions” is also what tends to make their situations even worse.

To be sure, some second-act employment counseling can be useful, and there are workers who manage to obtain their coveted second acts. In Boston, I attended an impressive program called RE:Launch for middle-aged job-hunters, where they were taught about creating better résumés, for instance, but weren’t hectored for their failure to brand.

Self-reinvention is an encouraging conceit.

It is simply not always a possible one.

We should look to create fixes for middle-aged workers that are not solely reliant on private inspirations or pricey new degrees. We need public solutions for midlife career atrophy and joblessness so that people don’t get into even deeper debt and blame themselves for their failures.

The truth of the second act may not, after all, be found within ourselves, but without.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4009862&forum_id=2#36306070)



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Date: June 25th, 2018 12:53 PM
Author: sick citrine prole



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4009862&forum_id=2#36306081)



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Date: June 25th, 2018 12:58 PM
Author: odious macaca

She'd rather flush $16,000 in sunk costs down the toilet than figure out voice recognition software?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4009862&forum_id=2#36306115)



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Date: June 25th, 2018 12:59 PM
Author: Milky library dysfunction

Maybe she broke both of her index fingers

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4009862&forum_id=2#36306121)



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Date: June 25th, 2018 1:04 PM
Author: sick citrine prole



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4009862&forum_id=2#36306151)



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Date: June 25th, 2018 1:08 PM
Author: Vivacious Useless Brakes Senate



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4009862&forum_id=2#36306183)



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Date: June 25th, 2018 12:57 PM
Author: Vivacious Useless Brakes Senate

“When I last spoke to her, she and her family owed $16,000 in student loans.”

Oh how could we ever burden boomers/gen x this way. Bail them out with taxpayer money!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4009862&forum_id=2#36306107)



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Date: July 17th, 2018 6:26 PM
Author: Flatulent very tactful parlour



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4009862&forum_id=2#36447473)