LOST
GENERATION
Jackson had taken her time to
decide where to go to college, contemplating what sort of program
would make best use of her skills.
In high school, she had sometimes
made costumes for her friends —
usually Japanese anime characters. So her mother suggested she
look into art school.
The Art Institute in Seattle is
part of a chain of 50 for-profit institutions across the nation. Looking back now, Jackson and her
mother are both struck by how
the admissions interview for the
school felt more like a marketing a
pitch. She was basically let in on
the spot, they recall.
“It was ‘OK, here’s the student
loan package. We need to hurry up
and get you enrolled,’” Rupe-Jackson says. “For my daughter, it was,
‘Oh yay, I want to go to school, and
I can start right away.’ But it just
didn’t seem right to me when I
thought about it afterward.”
When Jackson showed up at her
graduation gala, she got the first
sense that things were less than
advertised. The gala had been
billed as an industry event where
she would present her portfolio to
dozens of potential employers.
“No one from the fashion industry showed up to our show,”
HUFFINGTON
10.20.13
she recalls. “I didn’t hand out
any résumés.”
Over the following months, the
career services office sent sporadic job listings her way, but many
were for unpaid internships. Others were listings she could have
found by herself online, she says.
Desperate for income, she
worked shifts at Macy’s during
the 2010 holiday season, but was
laid off after the rush. She applied to other department stores,
hoping that more retail experience would put her on a path for
fashion-design gigs.
But many of those employers
sought more retail experience.
After being out of work for almost
a year, she landed another temporary retail job at a See’s Candies
store in the Portland area for the
2011 holiday season.
When that job ended, she got
in touch with a temp agency that
needed seamstresses to repair and
sew labels on lab coats. Hired on,
she hoped she was finally on her
way to something stable. But late
last year she was laid off again —
after she trained a new batch of
temp workers to do her old job.
By then, she had moved into
her own apartment. “I was frantic to get a new job,” she says. “I
had bills to pay.”
So she took whatever she could
get. She took the job at the super-