In the United States, the emergence in recent years of the so-called “Millennials”—the generation of people born between 1982 and 2004 has spawned an industry of experts young and old whose job is to stereotype students so colleges and businesses alike could understand them—and market to them—better. According to “The Millennial Muddle,” an article written by Eric Hoover for the October 11, 2009 issue of
The Chronicle of Higher Education, these highly competitive entrepreneurs can themselves be stereotyped as “smart, successful, and full of unshakable opinions” and combative to a point of describing one another’s work as “wrong,” “unempirical,” and “wildly mistaken.”
“Colleges and corporations pay these experts big bucks to help them understand the fresh-faced hordes that pack the nation's dorms and office buildings,” Hoover writes. “Ask them to explain today's teenagers and twentysomethings. Invite them to your campus to describe this generation's traits. Just make sure that they don’t all show up at the same time. They would argue, contradict one another, and leave you more baffled than ever.”
Read Eric Hoover’s “The Millennial Muddle” in Chronicle.com now!
