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Articles by Draut
"Winning Over Young Voters"
San Francisco Chronicle
March 23, 2006
This month marks the 35th anniversary of 18-to-20-year-olds winning the right to vote. While the presidential election of 2004 saw more than 20 million under-30 voters flooding the polls -- a 9 percentage point increase over 2000 -- the term "politically engaged" is seldom used to describe Generations X and Y. However, that may be about to change, as more and more 18-to-34-year-olds are realizing there's a big difference between the right to vote and a reason to vote. Though surely it was unintended, our policy-makers have provided this generation with a big reason to vote: economic insecurity.
Read the entire Op/Ed
Reviews of Strapped
"Book World Live with Tamara Draut"
Washington Post
March 22, 2006
Transcript from online chat
"Beyond Their Means"
Washington Post
Draut, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at the New York-based think tank Demos, offers diverse, thoroughly contextualized case studies with supporting statistical data, as well as the occasional outburst of advocacy. The thirty-something author knows whereof she writes, and occasionally references her own experience. But having already reached some milestones of adulthood -- marriage, career -- she also has some perspective on the situation. Read the entire article
"Strapped"
Georgia Straight
If you think Strapped is some sort of exercise in masochism, you’re partly right. After all, what 18-to-35-year-old needs to be told (in great statistical detail) how increasingly hard it is to get established as an independent adult these days? The dynamics are familiar: rent, tuition, and student debt loads are rising; wages fall, and higher (and dearer) degrees are required to get past the entry-level/no-exit job stream; credit-card survival debt is commonplace; and expenses lead many young adults to postpone (or pinch for) rites of passage that boomers took for granted, like getting your own apartment, a college or university degree, a car, a house, a spouse, a baby. The American dream of raising yourself into the middle class is slipping further out of reach.
Read the entire review
"Cutting the Purse Strings"
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Boomers' kids have it rough, according to a new book, "Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead" (Doubleday) by Tamara Draut. The phenomenon has less to do with poor money management than with skyrocketing housing prices, college tuition increases, depressed wages, increasing health costs and credit-card debt, Draut says in her book. Read the entire article
"Austinist Interviews Tamara Draut, Author of Strapped"
Austinist
Among the problems we face, according to Draut, are the rising costs of higher education paired with dwindling financial aid; a cut-throat economy in which wages haven't kept pace with inflation, benefits are a luxury, and job security is an oxymoron; and the rising housing costs that have priced many young adults out of homeownership and made living on one's own nearly impossible. Read the entire interview
"On, not off, The Bus"
The Oregonian
The center of attraction Tuesday was Tamara Draut, the feisty young New York author of the latest Gen Y Us? bible, "Strapped." That's the book that seeks to explain why so many young people find themselves "swimming upstream" economically. Read the entire article
Economics of youth
The Plain Dealer
The percentage of students in the debt-for-diploma predicament rose from 49 percent in 1993 to 65 percent in 2000, Draut reports. With the generation that graduates high school in 2015 expected to be the most populous in history, this problem is accelerating. The premium on education is such that a bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma, and grad school is the new college - even as the cost of college tuition quadrupled in the 1990s. Read the entire article
'Generation Debt' is going deep into the red
MSNBC.com
Draut argued that the young get a bad rap for consumer consumption. “Consumer pressures are definitely greater but since three-quarters of this age group do not have bachelor degrees, the idea of living this lavish lifestyle with iPods and $5 coffees does not really hold true.Read the entire article
The broke generation
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Through interviews with more than 100 college-educated young adults, along with an examination of various social and economic trends, Draut claims the gloomy conditions have less to do with extravagant spending habits and more to do with skyrocketing housing prices, college tuition increases, credit card debt, depressed wages and increasing health costs. Read the entire article
How Bad Rap, Stacked Deck, Tuition Whomps the 'Slacker' Set
Bloombery.com
Tamara Draut, author of "Strapped", writes about the career instability that many in this stratum confront. They are more likely to hold a succession of temporary jobs that offer few benefits and little chance for advancement. They're often the first to be fired in a slump. Read the entire article
Ask the Pro
Newsweek Tip Sheet
Tamara Draut, author of "Strapped: Why America's 20-and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead," spoke to TIP SHEET's Linda Stern about how the young can save. Read the entire interview
Up Against It At 25
Business Week
But to get over that, try looking at Strapped and Generation Debt as guides to what may be a foreign culture full of young people whose professional ambitions are often frustrated and whose expectations of material comfort may never be met. You could come away thinking that they have a point. Or at least you might better understand your own children. Read the entire article
Young earners face intense financial challenge
USA TODAY
The picture for young adults is bleak. College loan debt is at an all-time high. Rental rates are through the roof. Wages are stagnant. Credit cards are getting maxed out left and right.
In short, this group is getting hit from all sides, and they're strapped — for cash, that is. Read the entire article
Paycheck paralysis
CNNMoney.com
If ever you find yourself pining for your 20s or 30s, you might reconsider.
Sure, you'll never look that good again. But to hear Tamara Draut tell it, folks in their 20s and 30s today – from middle- and lower-income households primarily – have never had it so tough financially. In her book, "Strapped: Why America's 20-and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead," Draut cites a number of hindering factors. Key among them: debt coupled with paycheck paralysis Read the entire article
Small Change
Village Voice
Strapped, by Tamara Draut, cuts out much of Kamenetz's slack and expands on an interesting twist. It's not just that Generation Debters haven't been given a safety net—reared during the Reagan years, they're not prepared to agitate for it. Instead, their '80s upbringing conditioned them to go it alone, working temp jobs, settling debts, and often getting educated at the same time.
Read the entire article
The underwhelming under-35 vote
Toronto Star
Young adults with similar concerns should probably run, not walk, to their local bookstore and pick up a copy of Strapped, a new book by Tamara Draut on the plight of 20-and-30-somethings in America who have essentially been shut out of the new economy and have — to their own considerable cost — all but tuned out of politics.
Draut's analysis — both a lament for a generation and a call to arms — is as dire for young people as it is difficult to refute.
Read the entire article
Out of reach: College debt and unstable economy keep young adults 'Strapped'
Boston Herald
Today’s young adults, 18- to 34-year-olds, are coming of age in an America that no longer rewards hard work, says Draut. A bachelor’s degree has become the new high school diploma - in 1972, the average annual income for a male high school graduate was $42,630, in inflation-adjusted dollars. In 2002, such a graduate’s average income was $29,647.
According to Draut, young adults have heeded the call of higher education but individually taken on an average of $20,000 in student loans to do so. Entering adulthood deep in debt creates a ripple effect that hinders young adults’ abilities to save money, buy a home, get married and have children. And the American economy isn’t helping.
Read the entire article
Why getting ahead has gotten harder for young adults
Metro - NY, Boston & Philadelphia editions
All too often, 20- and 30-somethings blame their dire financial straits entirely on themselves. They wonder whether they should be working in a different field that pays more money; whether they should move to a cheaper city; whether they should have skipped college and avoided all that debt. But rethinking all these decisions won’t change a fundamental fact: Getting ahead has gotten harder. Read the entire article
Deferred futures - Why young adults can't hang on to what they earn
San Francisco Chronicle
"In her convincing, impressively researched call to arms, "Strapped," she explains why your genteel temp gig masquerading as a job won't cover your outrageous housing costs, oppressive credit card bills, outsize health care premiums and payments on your five-figure student loan."
Read the entire review
Young dream-seekers strapped by debt
The Christian Science Monitor
"Tamara Draut and Stuart Fink didn't expect it to come to this. After
eight years of marriage, the couple found themselves with less than a
dollar and with three days until the next paycheck. Seated on the
living room floor, they sorted through their compact discs, choosing
ones to sell."
Read the entire review
Pop Matters
"I didn't need Tamara Draut to tell me that I'm strapped, but I did need her to tell my mom. In the five years since I graduated college, the same argument arises again and again. I insist that it's much harder to make a living now versus when she was my age in the mid-'70s. My mom disagrees, and continues to wonder why I haven't taken her advice and purchased a home."
Read the entire review
"It's hard to believe: "Today's college grads are making less than the college grads of thirty years ago." In fact, men aged 25 to 34 with bachelor's degrees are making just $6,000 more than those with high school diplomas did in 1972. This is just one of the many shocking statistics uncovered by Draut, a think-tank adviser and media pundit, in this incisive and revealing look at why today's young adults find financial independence so difficult. With catchy terms such as "debt-for-diploma" and "paycheck paralysis," Draut shows why this age group's ability to accomplish the traditional adult markers of school, career and family is stagnating. Her presentation features the one-two punch of well-sourced data and a series of stories from a diverse group of interview subjects to prove her thesis that depressed wages, inflated educational costs, soaring credit card debt and skyrocketing health and child-care expenses present nearly insurmountable obstacles to young adults' success. While Draut's conclusions take conservative politicians to task, they are hardly polemical, and her analysis and solutions are refreshingly free of glib how-to advice. Her book should be a jarring wake-up call to both the generation affected most by the current economic reality and the policy makers facing the consequences for decades to come. (Jan.)"
"Student loans, credit card debt, low wages, and the rising cost of living expenses have created the 'perfect storm' confronting young adults between the ages of 20 and 30. Draut, who directs the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos, headquartered in New York, here paints a sobering picture of how the world has changed for the children of the baby boomer generation who, unlike their parents, are facing staggering amounts of debt. To cope, many are taking jobs they might not want, delaying starting families, or even living with their parents. How did this happen? Draut offers a chronology and carefully documents the causes of these circumstances. While she is cautiously hopeful in outlining various remedies - e.g. college education affordable for anyone who wants one - Draut is also realistic in assessing the lack of political courage required by Washington politicians to provide them. Thus, the outcome is doubtful. Although too many data at times overload her point, the author's thesis that "it is harder and more costly to become an adult" in America today is both inescapable and eloquent. This vital work should be read by anyone who cares about the future of this country. Highly recommended. -- Richard Drezen, Washington Post New York Bureau"
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