Yes, but I'm not sure how different this is from any other generation or era.
See above.
There's always been young people making good money and others unable to get traction.
Correct, but what's different now is how the ratio has changed, and how much more costly "paying the dues" is now.
Kids today are getting good jobs in fields that didn't even exist 5 years ago.
Whereas before those same young people would get getting great jobs in fields that have existed a long time. Not only has the excessive accomplishment of university degrees devalued them in the context of securing one's own future, but the structure of work, itself, has been drastically changed, with Taylor's scientific management dutifully applied so well that more and more of the work that needs to be done can now be done with lesser skills and more interchageable skills, yielding a situation where there is a far greater supply of workers available to choose from and a far lesser demand. Greater supply and lesser demand explains why wage growth has been completely flat since the mid-1970s, while productivity has continued to skyrocket. Recall that wage growth tracked with productivity for fifty years before that.
The media touts the company executives who claim that they cannot find enough qualified workers. Dig into those sensationalistic media stories and you find the truth: That they're talking about a very small subset of work, and more importantly, a subset of work that our society has failed to properly value. If such work paid enough and could be relied on to pay enough for a full career, that would naturally draw students to that discipline. We saw that happen for doctors in the 1960s and lawyers in the 1970s and software developers in the 1980s. I suspect that the commoditization of software development was part of what broke the natural system that previously fed industry with enough qualified workers.
Sadly, "Life isn't fair" but it's sort of the way it's always been. Wanting a world where everyone gets a fair shot is admirable but not something I expect to see.
Look at the statistics and you see that our society was well on the way, even past the 1970s. This developed into a system, first outlined by Ian Mitroff in 1983, within which responsible companies would view their business from the standpoint of its impact on: (simplified)
- investors/owners
- customers
- employees
- society
The attacks on this system began by the mid-1990s, most notably by what seemed to be an evolution of Mitroff's stakeholder model, but in reality was an opposing model, the Balanced Scorecard, that sought to turn the non-investor/owner stakeholders (customers, employees, and society) into commodities that could each be turned to fostering the interests of investors/owners. The 2002-2003 recession was the "excuse" that allowed industry to completely break the systems that were improving things for most Americans, and switch us onto a track where quarterly profits to investors/owners were the only concern.
I have no data except from personal experience...
And that's critical. Data is the only way to gain a reliably accurate understanding of the situation. Anecdotal experience can, indeed, very readily lead you to the incorrect conclusions about the situation. And in this case, there is a real danger that it could lead someone to fostering grievously unforgivable notions about other people, simply because they didn't have the luck that the anecdotal examples were privileged with.
I'm not buying the oh wo is me I can't do it in this day and age" story.
That's why it is so important to expose you and others to the reality of this situation, even those of us doing so are not benefiting from doing so, and indeed we would benefit if what you believed was actually true.
