Highly educated, sometimes entitled and incredibly humbled by the current labor market, Generation Y is hungry for work. But do employers understand this enormous and grossly underemployed demographic?

Nearly eighty million strong, Gen Y is loosely defined as those born between 1980 and 1994 (or 2005 depending on who you talk to). Raised in a kid-centric time, many continue to be coddled by helicopter parents not willing to wean their precious lot from the proverbial financial teat. As a result, Gen Y’s expectations of the workforce are vastly different from baby boomers and even the closely-related Generation X.

“When they get to the workplace, they have a sense of entitlement, a need for validation, difficulty in really discerning what to do because their whole lives were managed,” says Christine Hassler, a Gen Y career expert and consultant to American Express on Millennials. “They have challenges with making decisions and have expectations of work-life balance. They want their opinion to matter and [want to work] for a company that is really making a difference.”

Major employers are struggling to understand this often fickle demographic, choosing instead to focus on candidates familiar with the corporate structure. And in this fragile economy, a new employee who can hit the ground running is an asset. ”I’m seeing a lot of corporations saying they know they need to engage Gen Y and hire young employers because it costs less, but they don’t want to take the risk of hiring someone without work experience,” says Hassler.

Corporate America is also waiting for this demographic to conform to the old playbook, something completely foreign to Generation Y, says Garrison Wynn, CEO of career management website Wynn Solutions and author of “The Real Truth About Success.” They were told they could have everything they wanted and could be whatever they wanted to be. ”They’ve come to collect on that,” Wynn says. “That’s what they expect. So, when they get in a job interview and it looks like the path isn’t going to be good enough or fast enough, then they’re not interested.”

Volatility in global markets, weak domestic growth and persistent economic concerns in Europe are also complicating an organization’s willingness to expand, despite high corporate profits. “The pain of downsizing and the destruction of the organization is so difficult that companies are playing it safe,” says Jackie Greaner, North America practice leader, talent management and organization alignment for Towers Watson. “It’s hard in this type of market, where it goes up and down to such a degree; it leaves everyone feeling less than confident about the state of the economy.”

“I told you so.”

Those are the four words no spouse wants to hear from their partner, especially when it comes to investing and retirement planning.

Just ask Dr. David Rothberg. Rothberg, 59, and his wife heavily invested in tech giant Cisco way back in the mid-1990s. She wanted to shift money into bonds instead. But that’s not Rothberg’s style: “I’m an aggressive investor, and the market was going up 30 percentage points per year, so why would I invest in something that would get us six percent?”

As the technology boom went bust, Cisco’s revenue fell for the first time in the company’s history. By the summer of 2001, sales were down one-third compared to six months prior. Cisco stock had lost 68 percent of its value in 10 short weeks.

“I should have listened to my wife, but I didn’t,” says Rothberg, an ophthalmologist based in Clearwater, Florida.

Are these verbal jousts between couples hindering financial decisions? According to new research from Charles Schwab Corp, they do. The survey revealed the majority of Americans — both single and coupled — believe planning for your golden years is likely smooth sailing for the non-married cohort.

Among the survey’s findings:

Weathering the storm has lost popularity points with investors in the latest round of market volatility, prompting some to wonder if panic and irrationality are the name of the new game.

Investors pulled $31.3 billion out of U.S. equity funds in the two weeks ending August 10, reaching outflow levels not seen since the stock market collapse of March 2009.

Finding the reason behind that seemingly irrational sell-off may require more analysis than most economists or stock market watchers can perform. Perhaps the motivations behind our investing decisions are actually a question better put to neuroscience.

“Certainly, economic fundamentals play a valuable role in the value of assets and the prices that things trade for. But when individuals are making buy-and-sell decisions they can be very influenced on what is going on in their brains, including emotions,” says Lisa Kramer, associate professor of finance at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Kramer has done extensive research on how human emotion — specifically in relation to seasonal depression — influences financial decisions and financial markets.

“We’re prone to weighing recent information more heavily than more historical information. The fact that we’ve just been through a financial crisis in the last couple of years is looming large on our minds,” she says.  “When we see things start to go south again in the market, we go to that bad place in our minds and I think that can drive us to act impulsively more so than we would have a few years ago before we lived through this kind of volatile period.”

This historical hangover, coupled with the understanding of the body’s risk/reward system, has lead researchers to hypothesize that an investor’s urge to buy or sell at the wrong time could be a by-product of our neural processes overriding reason.

Kramer explains if one were to do a functional MRI analysis while an investor was in the process of making a financial decision — let’s say whether to buy a stock or a bond — “you’ll find that the part of the brain that’s activated when somebody makes the risky choice is called the nucleus accumbens (NACC) and it’s activated when people are experiencing pleasurable, things like food or sex. The part of the brain that’s activated when people make the safe choice is called the anterior insula and it’s more associated with pain and fear,” she says.

Ten years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find philanthropy specialists in most private banking and investment firms.  But today, philanthropic services are a major division of most wealth management operations, offering clients a myriad of investment vehicles and services to do good.

“It was an add-on before, something extra that they did to be kind or nice, but I think it’s now a business magnet for dealing with all different parts of an individual’s wealth,” says Eileen Heisman, CEO and President, National Philanthropic Trust.

“They’re not just dealing with private equity investing or alternative investments or making sure the money is going to the next generation through tax planning – philanthropy has become a central part of relationship management because it’s so much a part of a high-net-worth individual’s life.”

Looking to give back by donating your dollars or expertise? Reuters Money interviewed executives from some of the most prominent financial institutions to see how they stack up in the philanthropic space.

Bank of America

What makes the services unique? Gillian Howell,  national private philanthropy executive with Bank of America, believes it’s the “depth and breadth of our expertise and specialization,” that differentiates the bank from its competition. With 179 people, with an average of 15 years experience each working with high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth individuals, they boast a national reach with regional and local expertise.

Along with services for individual investors, BofA also manages institutional philanthropy under the group’s Philanthropic Solutions umbrella. “We’ve got a nice synergy between the two of them that makes them pretty unique too,” she says.

In 2008, Ron DeFore had dreams of putting his 3,000-square-foot basement to good use — think swank home theater system, game room, a couple of extra bedrooms — but then the global financial system went to hell in a handbasket.

“I haven’t thought of doing that [renovation] since 2008 for financial reasons,” says DeFore. Between 2001 and 2004, DeFore sunk roughly $500,000 into his 11,000-square-foot, Washington-area home, which he purchased for $1.1 million 10 years ago.

Before the crash, his property was valued at approximately $1.9 million. But a recent appraisal during a refinancing revealed his home was now valued at $1.3 million. “We’ve probably over-built for the neighborhood, which is a high-end neighborhood — nothing less than five-acre estates with pools and tennis courts,” he says.

DeFore is one of a growing list of homeowners delaying renovations, thanks to an anemic economic recovery. Spending on home improvement dipped in the second quarter of this year, with the National Association of Home Builders’ (NAHB) Remodeling Market Index falling from 46.5 in the first quarter to 43.9 in the second.

The remodeling market is expected to remain weak through 2012, with renovation spending projected to be down four percent through the first quarter of next year, according to the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA) released by the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

“I think that largely has to do with the broader economy and what’s going on in the housing market,” says Kermit Baker, director of the Remodeling and Futures program. “Housing prices looked like they were recovering and then fell again, and that’s pretty critical for remodeling. It’s difficult for a home owner to take on a home improvement project if they’re not convinced that home prices are stable.”

And as the economy continues to stall, shoppers are also avoiding the aisles of home improvement stores. Earlier this month, consumer sentiment plummeted to its lowest level in three decades, helping to cripple the outlook for building-supply stores like Lowes. The home-improvement chain reported weaker-than-expected quarterly sales earlier this week and cut its fiscal outlook.