Gen Z Woman Is Called Entitled For Complaining That Her 2 College Degrees Have Only Earned Her A Customer Service Job
Many felt she was entitled and ungrateful. But doesn't she kind of have a point?
ภาพของPBXStudio / Canva Pro A Gen Z woman has gotten tons of blowback for complaining about her experience in the job market from people who feel her expectations are totally unrealistic.
However, many feel her situation nonetheless underlines how broken our economy and job markets really are.
The Gen Z'er complained that she has 2 degrees and can only get customer service work.
Kat, a recent college graduate and TikToker, captioned her video with a question that is likely on the lips of many debt-saddled Gen Z people who've recently entered the job market: "Why did we trust the adults?"
In her video, Kat explained that after four years of dead ends, she's frustrated and mystified by the way her job search has gone — that despite having two bachelor's degrees and a certification, she is not getting anywhere.
"Can anyone explain to me how I have two degrees… and a certificate… and the only person I have responding to me is a man [named Bart] from… a tech company saying, 'hey, you want to answer some customer service problems, you want to answer some customer service calls?'"
She said she feels overqualified for customer service jobs, but others thought she was entitled, ungrateful, and had unrealistic expectations.
"No offense, but I'm a little more qualified than to just to be sitting around answering your customer service calls," Kat went on to say in her video.
"But Bart is the only one who's responding to me," she said, "so, what am I supposed to do?" She then looked down at her two degrees and her certification and asked, "What was this for again?"
Suffice it to say her video did not quite land the way she intended. Many felt she was entitled and arrogant, and even a man claiming to be Bart himself showed up in her comments, writing, "I’m sorry. I was just trying to help." People applauded him for clapping back, with one writing, "I can’t believe how ungrateful she was to you."
Others felt her expectations were just totally out of line. "You gotta start somewhere" was a familiar refrain, with many suggesting that taking a job answering customer service calls might be exactly the foot in the door she needs.
"Take the job," one woman wrote. "I started as an admin assistant WITH a degree, and now, a year later, I make double my original salary because I took the lower-paying job and got the experience."
Others felt that the uproar over her video was missing the real point: Getting a degree offers no guarantees anymore.
"I graduated with a degree in bioengineering and answered phones for almost 2 years," one woman wrote in Kat's comments. "It’s humbling but the degree doesn’t open doors like people think."
Even many who agreed she was expecting too much still agreed that Kat's situation speaks to something fundamentally broken about how our job market and economy operate nowadays.
As CEO Austen Allread put it in a tweet, "Everyone is ripping on this girl… but some of the responsibility should be shared by the people who told her for 20 years if she just got degrees people would be begging to hire her."
That is, of course, no longer the case and hasn't been for a while. A degree no longer offers many guarantees, and problems like wage stagnation, especially when measured against the staggering amount of debt required to go to college, can make it hard to see the value in graduating.
Also problematic are factors like credential inflation, which even basic entry-level jobs that never used to require a college degree now do — like taking customer service phone calls, for instance. This is, in part, because so many more young people have degrees than ever before.
Given all these factors, it's not exactly surprising that college enrollment has begun to decline. Still, most studies show that having a college degree does correlate with higher lifetime earnings in most cases, so not going to college isn't necessarily the answer.
But it is high time that parents, educators, school counselors, and the like start being honest with kids about how their future is likely to look.
The conventional wisdom of college, above all else, as the ticket to a bright future is saddling way too many young people with six figures of debt and entry-level jobs that often pay less than waiting tables. Can you really blame people like Kat for feeling angry and betrayed about that?
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.