The Ultimate in Tracking

Detroit is recognized nationally as a city that is nearing bottom--outlandishly high unemployment, rampant crime, and just awful public schools. Never having visited, I cant say more than that, but suffice it to say that Detroit's national reputation is nothing to brag about.

And now this, what I call in the title "The Ultimate in Tracking." Since I'm not sure I can improve on the utter idiocy encapsulated in the title, I'll just give you the link with the original title: Detroit schools offer class in how to work at Walmart.

Yes, you read that right. Four inner city public high schools in Detroit are collaborating with the retail giant to offer for-credit courses on "job-readiness training". Leaving aside the, ahem, questionable reputation Walmart enjoys nationally, the message of this kind of offering is blatantly offensive. Train inner city (almost entirely black and minority) kids to be cashiers and low-paid associates in Walmart stores as part of the school curriculum? When were maxims like 'aim high', 'follow your dreams' and 'anything's possible' replaced with the less inspiring 'take what you can get' and 'a paycheck's a paycheck' or, more damning, 'this is the best you can do'?

Also, we mustn't ignore the racialized undertones--perhaps overtones--of such a program. Do we see similar courses offered at suburban (read: white) schools? Of course not. Middle and upper class kids, first of all, don't want to work at Walmart, but more importantly, they and their parents are encouraged to imagine a better future. Detroit kids? They're being told that this is what's available, go to it. It's abominable, really.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for job training and vocational education (I know that's a dirty word now--career preparation? what's the proper term nowadays?) in schools. I think it serves an important purpose; while I was in high school, the courses I took in English, history and even drama helped prepare me for my hoped-for career as an educator or policy analyst. There's a difference, of course. My courses helped prepare me for a career while also broadening my horizons, teaching me valuable life-skills and alighting a love of learning. This is what school should be all about--not training for a menial, low-paying job that's unlikely to lead anywhere. If schools impart one thing to their students, it should be encouraging that love of learning. Walmart does the opposite.

I've bloviated about my feelings enough; take a look at the Freep article, this segment in particular. It's just...unbelievable is an understatement.

Sean Vann, principal at Douglass [one of the four participating schools], said 30 students at that school will get jobs at Walmart. He said the program will allow students an opportunity to earn money and to be exposed to people from different cultures - since all of the stores are in the suburbs.

Follow me on Twitter! @WillEhrenfeld

Thanks to @arotherham for the link (and check out his blog)

An Argument Against Teach For America

As a college senior with a liberal arts degree coming and difficult job prospects, I, like many others, was interested in Teach For America (TFA) and similar programs. I applied for and interviewed for the New York City Teaching Fellowship, but without any skills in math or science I was rejected from that program and, I don't mind admitting it, after a phone interview I was rejected from TFA as well. I hope to assure you that this post isn't revenge-based or personal in any way, I had nothing but pleasant interactions with the folks at TFA, and I have lots of friends who are planning on becoming Corps members in the fall. I wish them nothing but good luck.

I have three main arguments to make against Teach For America and imitator programs: the first is about the schools where corps members are placed and those students, the second is about teacher preparation, and the third is about effects on current teachers and schools. But first, I want to make a thematic, more broad-based argument about the fundamental beliefs espoused by TFA.

When you listen to Wendy Kopp and others in the braintrust of TFA talk about what they seek to accomplish, rarely is the word "education" mentioned. Their buzzword of choice is "leadership". Some have argued that TFA doesn't really believe in education. I wouldn't go that far, but their approach implies a fundamental disrespect for the teaching profession. The clear implication is that current teachers are inadequate, poorly-educated themselves or, to co-opt some of TFA's language, not truly leaders. As a result, TFA offers its corps members as an alternate to regularly-trained teachers.

But, the really important thing here, the really offensive bit about TFA, is that they only train corps members for about two months before thrusting them into a classroom--in a poor, high-need school, at that. Regular M.A.T. programs last at least one academic year, include practicums in classrooms and involve apprenticeships, at least in some programs. TFA only trains their corps members for a brief period, and as a result they aren't as well-prepared as they could be. Furthermore, think about the language that's used by TFA: the new teachers they employ are called "corps members" instead of teachers. Why?

Effects on Students

This follows smoothly into my first substantive argument: Teach For America corps members are poorly prepared to do the job they are assigned and, as a result, students suffer. This isn't to besmirch the fine young people who participate in TFA--in fact they are often very smart, capable, and motivated. But to effectively teach in a high-need school, experience is necessary. Talk to some older teachers, and the consensus is clear: years of experience are required before you become even an adequate educator. In the first years of being a classroom teacher, you're learning about classroom management, curriculum design, pedagogical methods, and navigating a school culture. For TFA teachers, add the element of adapting to a new city/culture and your life becomes so harried as to be nearly impossible.

TFA is designed in such a way as to make life difficult, not only for teachers but for students. Teaching is a demanding profession by its nature, and it is not for the faint of heart. Additionally, teaching is high pressure--no one is there to catch and correct your mistakes, so if you fail to teach your kids how to read, that's it. You may have permanently screwed up some kids lives. Experience as an assistant or apprentice teacher is essential to success as a first year solo teacher, but TFA has no patience for this kind of preparation.

The Best Way to Prepare for a Career in Education

If you are a college grad from a place like Tufts or, hell, even our pretentious neighbor to the south, Harvard, pursuing a career in education is admirable and, outside of Teach For America, relatively rare. 11% of Ivy League seniors applied to the program this year--over 35,000 applications were received for positions starting in Fall 2009 (source: USA Today). For everyone planning an entry into the field, teaching is something that must be learned. Even those with extensive tutoring or "leadership" experience will have an adjustment period when s/he first moves into a classroom and is left responsible for 20-35 students.

As a college senior in just this situation, I want to share my own perspective. As I said, I'm not yet a teacher and have limited direct experience in education, so take my ideas with a grain of salt, certainly. In any case: to be an effective teacher, especially without graduate school, young teachers need to learn from those around them. In the schools where TFA members are typically placed, there is a dearth of experienced teachers and, generally, a pretty lousy infrastructure. The opportunities to learn from colleagues are limited. If you, like me, want to be an effective teacher in your first year, the ideal situation is to work at a really successful school and learn how it works. Being at a suburban or independent urban school doesn't fit within the philanthropic ethos of our generation, but seeing and being part of something that works is hugely valuable for aspiring educators.

The idea that you (or I) could go into a school with few resources and inadequate funding, a place that chews teachers up and spits them up--to think that a 22-year-old kid could show up in September with no training and really thrive is ludicrous. Working in a school that works and eventually moving into higher-need schools makes more sense from every perspective. Experience is uncontroversially important in education, so the spitting in its face by TFA is particularly galling.

TFA's Effect on Teachers and Unions

TFA placed its first corps members in Boston in 2009, which led to this reaction from Boston Teachers Union president Richard Stutman: "We are not disturbed but furious that the department would lay off teachers with excellent credentials and bring in people with no experience and little training." He added, "They are sending a very bad message to teaching staff."

In Detroit, which also hosted corps members for the first time in 2009, teacher's union president Keith Johnson called them "educational mercenaries." Teachers, almost all better qualified than TFA corps members, are being laid off and then replaced by union-busting kids who have no intention of staying in the job for more than two years. It's wrong, it's unjust, and Stutman and Johnson have very legitimate grudges as expressed above (source: Boston Globe).


People have been making fun of TFA and Wendy Kopp, who founded the organization as part of her senior thesis, as far back as 1994. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the phenomenal memoir written by Dave Eggers, he quotes a segment from the upstart Might Magazine, which Eggers co-founded, which pans Kopp and TFA pretty accurately and intelligently. It is a satirical profile of "Cindy Kahn," who is identified as the founder of "Streets For America."

"Streets For America, an idea born from Kahn's senior thesis at Harvard, is now a multibillion dollar nonprofit corporation. Placing recent college grads on the streets of America's most dangerous cities, the program's purpose is to reinvigorate the country's police force with fresh faces, open minds and good breeding. 'All the regular cops seemed to be so stupid and ugly,' says Kahn. 'It was time to bring some class to law enforcement. You can bet hardened criminals will sit up and take notice if the person who's cuffing them is well-dressed and, say, has a master's from Yale.'"

The idea that recent college grads with no experience can teach in high-need schools is just about as appalling as the thought that these same young people could up and become police officers. I'm proud to say I've come to the conclusion that I am not qualified or prepared to teach in an urban school yet, and I'm pursuing alternate opportunities next year.


I'll leave you with an interesting proposal from Ira David Socol , a noted critic of TFA. Not my advocacy, but something to think about:

"I say, over and over, that if TFA wants to prove itself, replace the faculties of the schools in Scarsdale, NY or Greenwich, CT, or at Groton and St. Bernard’s, with TFA corps members. And let those teachers – holding their current salaries – go to the TFA placements. If TFA improves the education in those wealthy places, it will have proved itself. If the teachers from those top schools have better impacts than TFA teachers do in the impoverished districts, we’ll know that better teacher training, better teacher pay, and redistributing resources is the way to go."

New Directions

Hi, faithful readers.

I want to make an announcement here: up until this point, this blog had been serving as a sort of repository for published pieces of mine or about me, without a lot of unique content. Moving forward, I'm changing this blog into one focused more directly on educational issues.

I want to focus on education, both domestic and international. I'll include links, opinion pieces, independent research that I conduct, and lots more. I hope you all enjoy, and stay tuned for a piece coming up.

For now, I'll include links to some of the most interesting education resources on the web and good articles I've come across recently.

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This is an ongoing debate between Debbie Meier and Diane Ravitch, both of whom are fantastic writers and speakers and who have great things to say about education reform. See their blog on Education Week.

New York Times' piece on the destruction of higher education in Haiti following the earthquake: "Education Was Also Leveled by Quake in Haiti"

Roundtable on Charters and Equality from Democracy Now.

In Schools We Trust?

Below is a reprint of the op-ed I co-wrote about education reform. It was published on Feb. 5 in the Tufts Daily. Link.

In schools we trust?
By Will Ehrenfeld and Shana Hurley

Published: Friday, February 5, 2010

Below the radar, using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are making radical changes to public education. They have established a grant called the "Race to the Top Fund" that offers competitive grants to "encourage and reward states that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform." The Fund is a $4.35 billion investment incentive for significant reforms in education policy. Among the improvements sought after, Obama and Duncan are planning on removing the state charter school caps and mandating the inclusion of students' test scores in teacher evaluations.

During last week's State of the Union Address to Congress, Obama heightened his pitch for education reform and reinforced his commitment to fundamentally changing the way schools function. "The idea here is simple," the President said. "Instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success. Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform." The administration is proposing an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, such as changing school financing to reward schools based on academic progress rather than the number of students within the district.

Even before Congress had considered the changes to No Child Left Behind, the impacts of Obama's education plans are already experienced in Massachusetts. In January, lawmakers passed a bill that expands charter school access in Massachusetts. Governor Deval Patrick affirmed that the education bill is "the beginning of the end of the achievement gap." There was, however, disagreement among Democrat legislators who were unsatisfied by the authorization of changes in teacher contracts outside of collective bargaining, the lack of funding provisions in the bill and the weight given to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam as a factor in determining which schools are to be considered underperforming. Lawmakers were also frustrated by the timeline of the bill. The bill was passed quickly to accommodate Massachusetts's Race to the Top Fund application deadlines. Because of this, important stakeholders felt they were left out of the process.

Though the increased attention for education reform is certainly laudable, there are also matters worth considering. Rushing to accommodate the top-down pressure for policy change is not without risk. There is no consensus over what educational success really looks like. There is only a broad agreement over the need for reform. However, exactly in what form that change should manifest -- and how should that change be measured -- is extremely controversial.

Scholars of education, parents and school professionals consistently debate the goals of schooling in America. To assume that all well-educated students can also perform well on a standardized test is not a widely accepted assertion; however, the White House plans on using to supposition as high performance will now correlate to an increase in funding.

Although a benchmark of the new policy is to remove the charter school cap, it is unclear that the expansion of charter schools will increase student achievement even if defining achievement through test scores. Charter schools have existed in the United States for a mere 20 years and in the more than 3,400 charters currently operating around the country, the report card is mixed. Extensive research of charter schools has not found that they provide significantly better educational outcomes than traditional public schools. So why is the White House pushing to expand charter schools? What about the needs of traditional schools?

Reforming public education is a project that has been taken on by nearly every president and Congress in recent history. From desegregation in the 1950s and '60s to No Child Left Behind up to the present Race to the Top contest, many approaches have been proposed, some have been implemented, and yet there is still a fervent desire for change. While no consensus exists on the path forward for public education reform, now is one of the most exciting moments in the history of American education. With a wide array of innovation occurring, options are expansive and few are without controversy.

The Tufts Democrats will host the fifth annual Issues of the Future Symposium: Education Reform on Saturday, Feb. 6 at 12 p.m. in the Alumnae Lounge. Deborah Meier, the founder of multiple schools, the award-winning author and the recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Grant, will provide the keynote speech, followed by two panels featuring leaders of public education in Boston and nationally.

The first panel, examining different educational models and best practices in public schooling, will feature three education professionals with fantastic, varied experience and backgrounds. Among these speakers are Kevin Brill, Larry Myatt and Alan Safran. Brill is the current Associate Head of School at Fenway High School, an innovative public school located across the street from Fenway Park. He has experience teaching in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and will be presenting with Myatt, the founder of Fenway High School. Myatt co-founded Boston's Center for Collaborative Education and serves as a Convener for The Forum for Education and Democracy. Safran, Executive Director of Media and Technology Charter High (MATCH) Charter Public High School in Boston. MATCH is nationally known as a leader in no-excuses schooling, with rigid discipline and extensive one-on-one and small-group tutoring helping them to achieve exceptionally high MCAS scores and plaudits from politicians and educators alike. Each of these men will provide their unique perspectives on education reform through a discussion of what works and what doesn't as well as the way forward for reform.

The second panel will consider some of the challenges, political and practical, of school reform. It will feature Josh Biber, Teach for America (TFA) Boston's Executive Director and Richard Stutman, President of the Boston Teachers Union. The two have fought publicly over contract issues and TFA's expansion into the Boston area, but share a common desire to improve public education. Joining them will be Dr. Tony Pierantozzi, Superintendent of Somerville Public Schools, who will provide insight about the diverse community in our backyard. With only one charter school at present, Somerville provides an interesting case study on which to consider the opportunities and challenges posed by the introduction of new school models into a community. Finally, Tufts' very own faculty member, Professor of Education Steve Cohen, will fill out this panel as a moderator, contributing his wealth of experience and knowledge to what we know will be a very lively discussion.

To consider these issues and others related to school reform, the Tufts Democrats are inviting the community to the Issues of the Future Symposium.

Thoughts on Israeli Politics

I'm just back from 10 days in Israel, and I have a lot to think about. I'll try to update a few times over the next few weeks as thoughts come up, but this first one is going to be short because, even though it's 9:40 on the East coast, it's 7 hours ahead in Israel and I'm tired.

We talked a lot about Israel being the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and that's certainly the case presently. It also has the most diverse and successful economy, vibrant politics and political culture. In comparative politics, Israel is often considered to be an "ethnic democracy," which by definition it is. It was established as a Jewish state for the Jewish people, but what I've learned over the past few days has entrenched my view that ethnic democracy is a contradiction in terms. In order to have an explicitly ethnic state, Israel has been forced not only to encourage immigration from around the world and promote aliyah (diaspora Jews moving to Israel), but also to expel and reject outsiders to a significant extent. Both inclusion and exclusion play a role.

Definitionally, democracy requires an embrace of pluralism and diversity. If different backgrounds, opinions and values aren't important to the state and the population, neither is democracy. In Israel, which is a state with significant diversity, most citizens are only interested in Jewish diversity in their explicitly Jewish state. Arabs, Druze, and other minorities are locked into their status as minorities regardless of increasing demographic change. In a few years, if the current trends hold, Arabs will comprise a majority in the land of Israel. This means, essentially, that in a few years an Arab--a non-Jew--could be the Prime Minister of Israel.

One of the Israeli soldiers on our trip, Mattan, suggested a Constitutional amendment allowing only a Jew to be the Prime Minister. This anti-democratic reform would ensure Jewish domination, even if Jews become the minority in the land of Israel. If this position were widely held or enacted, it would mark the end of true liberal democracy in Israel.

In short, ethnic democracy cannot exist. There is an inherent disconnect between pluralism and an ethnic state, which means Israel has to make a choice in the future.

Health care and the waning of progressive enthusiasm

This was initially written and has been cross-posted at Red, Brown and Blue, which is the politics blog for Tufts Office of Undergrad Admissions.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to see a debate on this topic.



I know it’s summer and some of us have more important things going on than following politics and reading this blog, but luckily for you all, I don’t. I’m relaxing and mentally preparing to head back to Tufts in the fall for senior year, but politics never fade far from my mind. This summer we’ve seen a very intense health care debate flaring up all over the country (even in liberal suburban Connecticut: check this out).

Commentary from the left and the right persistently asks the question: why are conservatives so passionate, so mobilized, and getting so much publicity, when all of those Obama liberals might as well be invisible? Well, for one, Democratic activists haven’t been silent, health care demonstrations around the country have attracted hundreds and even thousands of participants in support of reform, and amidst the loudest anti-reform voices, there are quiet, more polite liberals in the background. But I digress.

Democrats who supported Obama haven’t been as vocal in support of this reform bill as they could have been. The progressive grass- and netroots that did most of the legwork to elect President Obama have been relatively quiet and laid-back as the health care debate gets going. The energy and excitement coursing through Obama supporters in the campaign of 2008 is nowhere to be found.

Jonathan Cohn calls it “The Enthusiasm Gap” in a recent article in The New Republic. Polls are showing that Americans still largely support the major components of health care reform as proposed by the White House, but…well, no one seems to be doing anything about it. Crazies on the right are up in arms, hanging their representatives in effigy and accusing Obama and Democrats of being everything from socialists to granny-murderers, and the response from the left has been…casual, to say the least. No one seems to know why, but I have a few ideas.

Liberals are ambivalent about the legislation on the table to reform health care because, in essence, they’re worthless, watered-down proposals that won’t have much of an effect. As a proponent of single-payer health care, which would not only reduce costs to the individual but actually cover everybody, the bill Barack Obama is pushing is disappointing, to say the least. Most depressing, we can look back at the Hillary-care effort from 1993 longingly; that proposal included many of the provisions we are losing every day. Now, Obama-care is but a shadow of the long lost reform efforts of the Clinton administration. There is even talk that the public option may be dropped entirely.

Is this change we can believe in? More importantly, the first few months of the Obama administration have disappointed progressives on numerous other levels. One of the President’s first official actions was to bailout corporations like AIG to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, and he has been slow to act on many campaign issues that got him elected in the first place: Afghanistan is getting worse, not better; the pull-out of Iraq has been slow and with only mixed results; and the Bush-era crimes against humanity have yet to be investigated, let lone prosecuted. The list of disappointents is miles long.

As any self-respecting liberal ought to tell you, we as a movement are far from giving up. The recent Netroots Nation convention of progressive bloggers and activists confirms that there is still energy and excitement on the left for “change we can believe in”. But we’re tired of the endless compromises coming out of the White House and the Democratic caucus in both chambers of Congress. We worked to elect the President, and finally, for the first time in my political life, I expected to have a voice, however small, in the decision-making process in Washington. It hasn’t quite materialized–although I’m not ready to give up yet.

And whenever I get really down about the lack of progress on important issues like health care, I remind myself that it could certainly be worse. Imagine the country under President McCain and–I shudder to think–Vice President Palin. A scary picture indeed.

The New York Times writes about me

Here's the story: on one of the paper's blogs, The Choice, of which I am relatively frequent reader, they asked for college students who were living at home for the summer to talk about how the recession is affecting them and how the summer is going with internships drying up and parents' largely not being able to afford to support kids doing unpaid work away from home. So, I responded, not expecting anything to come of it, and day or 2 later the writer responds to me, asks a few more questions, and we go back and forth via email. THEN, when I'm out of town for a weekend, I get a call from a photographer for the Times, and she wants to come to my house to take my picture for this article. And now I'm in a huge photo on the cover of the Style section of the Sunday New York Times. check it out




Will Ehrenfeld, right, a Tufts senior, hoped for a White House summer internship but ended up with no job. He’s shown with Josh, his brother, a college graduate who is also jobless.

Say Hello to Underachieving

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: July 2, 2009

ERIN McAULIFFE had a vision for this summer. A 20-year-old junior at Bowdoin College, she had lined up an internship at a New York publishing house and imagined stimulating days leafing through manuscripts, and evenings of sparkling conversation with friends at downtown cafes.

She ended up starring in a real-life version of the movie “Adventureland” instead. In that recent comedy, a recent college graduate is forced by economic hardship to work at a suburban amusement park.

Life is imitating art for Ms. McAuliffe. With her parents unable to help bankroll three months of unpaid work in Manhattan, she gave up the internship offer and moved home to Andover, Mass., where she took the one job she could find: working 12-hour days at an amusement park. For $7.80 an hour, she tends bumper cars and the big swing, and endures the many carny jokes of her friends.

“It’s rain or shine,” Ms. McAuliffe said dryly about her job. “You’d be really surprised how many people go to an amusement park in the pouring rain.”

School’s out for summer 2009, and instead of getting a jump on the boundless futures that parents and colleges always promised them, students this year are receiving a reality check.

The well-paying summer jobs that in previous years seemed like a birthright have grown scarce, and pre-professional internships are disappearing as companies cut back across the board. Recession-strapped parents don’t always have the means or will to bankroll starter apartments or art tours of Tuscany.

So many college students and recent graduates are heading to where they least expected: back home, and facing an unfamiliar prospect: downtime, maybe too much of it. To a high-achieving generation whose schedules were once crammed with extracurricular activities meant to propel them into college, it feels like an empty summer — eerie, and a bit scary.

“Things have changed drastically,” said Ron Alsop, author of “The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace,” a book that only last year portrayed young workers as entitled and in a hurry. “It has to be a huge wake-up call for this generation.”

Numbers provide the backdrop to the story — not just the grimly familiar national unemployment rate, 9.5 percent in June, but the even scarier, less publicized unemployment figure for 16- to 19-year-olds, which has hit 24 percent, up from 16.1 percent two years ago. Internships available to college students have fallen 21 percent since last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Across the country, there are countless tales like that of Morgan Henderson, a student at the University of San Francisco, who, along with friends, planned a big road trip to Las Vegas this summer. With so few of the friends finding jobs, they downgraded plans to a road trip to Reno, then to no road trip at all. They’re spending time watching DVDs at one another’s houses.

Or Kathryn Estrada, a high school senior in Hialeah, Fla., who has no summer job after Circuit City, which employed her during the school year, went out of business. She is finding that even this early in the summer, attempts to while away the hours playing Scrabble and Cranium have grown stale. “We all just wish school would start so we would have something to do,” she said.

Or Will Ehrenfeld, a political science major at Tufts, who worked at a think tank last year and this summer was aiming higher: a White House internship. When the White House didn’t come through, and neither did the State Department or dozens of companies he applied to, Mr. Ehrenfeld, 20, moved back home to Vernon, Conn. Even the local Boston Market had no work.

Mr. Ehrenfeld, a top student who has always held leadership positions in clubs and academic groups, loafs through days, rolling out of bed around 11 and reading or playing trumpet or guitar. Nights, he sometimes meets up with friends who also have nowhere that they have to be in the morning, and they share a few cheap beers. “At worst, misery continues to have company,” he said.

While young people in earlier decades might have cherished the chance to goof off and sleep in for a few months, the current generation, experts like Mr. Alsop are apt to point out, “have always been told they can achieve anything they can put their mind to.”

“They were always given trophies just for showing up,” he said. “Now, they’re being told ‘no’ when they really want a job or an internship.”

To them, a staycation at Mom and Dad’s can feel more like house arrest.

If the only problem were tedium, students might find a recessionary summer unpleasant but endurable. But some expressed concern that the economic gloom might be a preview of harsh career realities that await.

“The worst thing about this summer is the lack of hope felt by so many kids,” Lydia Wiledon, a Barnard undergraduate, wrote in an e-mail message. “College students ready to thrust themselves into work find nothing, and those most in need are edged out by older, more skilled individuals who are overqualified for such foot-in-the-door opportunities. I worry about how this employment drought will affect my generation in the future.”

There may be reason for concern. Students who enter the job market during a recession can see their wages lag behind comparable students who graduated in better times for as long as 15 years, according to a recent study by Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at the Yale School of Management.

Even for students who remain optimistic about their long-term career prospects, an unexpected move home — back under the roof of Mom and Dad, where many had barely alighted in years except for brief Thanksgiving breaks — can require an attitude adjustment.

“Communication patterns are different when students come back from college,” said Roni Cohen-Sandler, a clinical psychologist in Weston, Conn., specializing in adolescent issues. “Kids may not be as interested in sharing who they’re hanging out with and why. The level of disclosure is different, and parents have not made the shift in their mind. They’re asking a lot of questions, and students are chafing.”

When students try to stave off the boredom by watching television, parents may wonder aloud if there is not a more productive use of their time. Curfews and household chores that seemed natural at 16 can seem oppressive at 20.

This has been the experience of Kelly Fabian, an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, who hoped to study art history in Rome this summer, but returned home to Orange County, Calif., instead, when her family asked her to work to help pay her tuition.

It’s an adjustment, she said. Living on her own for two years, including summers, she got used to doing chores like washing dishes and taking out the recycling — but not when instructed to.

“It’s not weird doing them, it’s weird having someone tell you to do them,” she said.

Ms. Fabian said she was close to her parents and valued the time spent together, but the new proximity did take getting used to, on all sides. Ms. Fabian, 20, found work at a cable-television company, and with four family members sharing two cars, she commutes for nearly an hour each way with her father, Jim Fabian.

The opportunity to bond is, in theory, delightful, she said — but does it have to be at 7 a.m.? “My Dad is a morning person and I most certainly am not,” she said. She needs a second cup of coffee just to make her lips move. When they reach for the radio knobs to pass the time, father and daughter encounter a generation gap: He likes sports talk radio; she would rather listen to the New Pornographers.

“I’m a relic of the ’70s — I still listen to the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac,” said Mr. Fabian, a financial consultant. “Her music, I’ll just describe it as different.“

Some other college students unexpectedly back home described frictions with their families that were less amusing and more fraught. Daniel Bortz, a junior at Syracuse University who was unable to find a summer job for the first time in five years, told of unpleasant friction in his household over money.

In the short term, the lost summer of 2009 might actually be a blessing, some psychologists said, especially because members of this generation have lived their lives like track stars trying to run a marathon at the pace of a 100-meter dash — their parents typically waiting at every turn with a stopwatch.

“Parents have really put a lot of pressure on the kids — everything has been organized, they’re all taking A.P. courses, then summer hits and they’re going to learning camps,” said Peter A. Spevak, a psychologist in Rockville, Md. Now, he said, with opportunities for achievement at a minimum this summer, “there is something to be said about sitting out on a warm evening and looking at the stars — they need more of this contemplation and self-evaluation.”

Sara Germano, a senior at Fordham University who was hoping to find a journalism internship in New York, ended up moving home to Albany, where she found part-time work as a research assistant. And she has gotten to know her family again after an educational career that usually led her off on one adventure or another during vacations, so that, she said, “I come home on Thanksgiving, they don’t even know who I am.”

Now she has time to watch Yankees games with her younger brother and sister, and in the evenings, she sometimes drops in to the bar that her father owns. At 21, she is now able to share a drink with him and to talk sports and politics with the regulars.

“I think he enjoys having a child who’s matured and can talk about adult things and enjoy adult pastimes,” she said. “Since I’ve been gone so long, it’s all new territory.”

Her father, Phil Germano, agreed. “She completes the family,” he said.