By KAREN BLUMENTHAL
For years, Pat Bearce had a message for his daughter Andrea: After her college graduation, she would be on her own financially. It has been three years, and she isn’t quite there yet.
After studying broadcast journalism at Texas Christian University, Andrea decided to pursue a career as a chef, choosing a pricey culinary school in New York City. The restaurant jobs she landed didn’t come with health coverage, so, in addition to guaranteeing her apartment lease in Manhattan, her parents covered her health-care costs for a couple of years. They paid her monthly cellphone bill, too. And she still has a jointly held credit card with her mother, Catherine.
“It’s pretty hard to get them launched,” says Mr. Bearce, a pilot at Boeing Co. in Seattle, who now says he never actually intended to enforce the deadline. “The real bottom line is that when they’re done with school, they’re not really done.”
The latest class of college graduates is entering the real world at a time when parents are finding it more difficult than ever to get their adult children off the family dole—and may be growing increasingly stretched themselves. For decades, the gap between the student years and adulthood has been widening, and the sour economy has only accelerated that trend.
The unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds stands at about 15%, compared with 9.7% for the whole work force. Then there is the worsening indebtedness problem: About two-thirds of 2008 graduates had student debt, and that debt averaged $23,200—up from $18,650 in 2004—according to the Project on Student Debt, a nonprofit group.
Ms. Bearce still shares a credit card account with her mother—but she uses it only to pay for emergencies.
But the financial ties go beyond job issues and the now-familiar decision to move back home for a while. The Obama administration’s two biggest pieces of consumer legislation—the new health-care law and the Credit Card Act—may keep parents directly involved in the upkeep of their adult children for far longer than they may have expected. And in the day-to-day world, family cellphone plans are so common and economical that adult children may remain on the plan until they form families of their own.
Julia Robinson for The Wall Street Journal
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