(I can't stand the appellation "young professionals", but that deserves a separate rant.)
An anonymous commenter responded:
please, please, please do your rant on the icky term "young professionals!" (we are what we do for money, and what we do for money is always very white collar??)
So here goes.
There are some instances when the use of "young professionals" is warranted: when career networking (and thus the actual "profession") is the explicit objective, or when referring derisively or jokingly to the "yuppie" stereotype.
But much of the time, the "professional" part is irrelevant. Really, people are just trying to refer to a particular age group, and the "professional" part is just incidental filler. This leads to one of two readings, both of which are offensive: 1) As Anonymous suggests, everyone is assumed to be a "professional". 2) There is no such assumption, but only "professionals" are invited.
If neither of these readings is intended and the goal is just to refer to an age group, then why does the phrase "young professional" have such traction?
I think it's like "Czech Republic".
We don't ordinarily refer to countries by their national adjective followed by their system of government. We don't say "Mexican Republic" or "Cuban Dictatorship" or "Iraqi Anarchy". We just use the noun forms of the countries' names.
But ever since Czechoslovakia split in 1993, the Czech part never had a noun name that caught on in English, just the adjective. (It was never an independent nation before; before World War I, it was part of Austria-Hungary along with much of central Europe.) Czechia has been suggested, but hasn't become popular yet. So in the meantime, we talk about the "Czech Republic", gratuitously mentioning its system of government for no good reason, all because of a grammatical constraint.
"Young professionals" is the same way. Really they just mean "young", but that's an adjective, so they need to find a noun to stick after it. "Young people" doesn't work, because that suggests children. What they mean is "young adults", but that doesn't work either, because that
The solution: If you want to refer to an age range, refer to the age range explicitly, and don't look for descriptive labels, because our language isn't versatile enough to provide one.