On the Graduating Class of 2010

A Lament for the Class of 2010: New college graduates face a labor force that neither wants or needs them; a plum job interning at a street fair

...hundreds of thousands of Millennials graduate from institutions of higher learning...Then they will enter a labor force that neither wants nor needs them.

They will enter an economy where roughly 17% of people aged 20 through 24 do not have a job, and where two million college graduates are unemployed. They will enter a world where they will compete tooth and nail for jobs as waitresses, pizza delivery men, file clerks, bouncers, trainee busboys, assistant baristas, interns at bodegas...

What could happen if a generation of underemployed, underpaid
educated and indebted young adults
become disillusioned by their elders’ financial mismanagement
and seek to identify and punish those responsible?

...In asserting that the sun will soon break through the clouds, they will be echoing what college grads told themselves last year, and the year before. This is only a temporary reversal.

...With the obvious exception of youngsters born during the Great Depression, no generation in American history faces more daunting obstacles.

...this may be that very rarest of things—a generation that does not do as well financially as the generation that spawned it.

Have private, exclusive, Ivy League educational institutions
been able to charge relatively exorbitant fees
by persuading the socially ambitious that name brand education
is eugenically indispensable?

...There are no jobs, and the jobs that do exist aren't the kinds anyone in his right mind would have spent $100,000 to $200,000 to land. Two, nothing in most middle-class kids' lives has prepared them emotionally for the world they are about to enter. Three, the legacy costs that society has imposed on young people will be a millstone around their necks for decades.

Who's going to pay for the health care bill? Gen Y.

Have most revolts been instigated by some with less who want more
against those with more?

Who's going to pay off the federal deficit? Gen Y.

What could happen if high school graduates
can’t afford or finance higher education
while indebted graduates can’t find jobs paying enough to cover bills?

Who's going to fund all those cops' and teachers' and firemen's pensions? Gen Y.

Who's going to support Baby Boomers as they suck the Social Security System dry while wheezing around Tuscany? Gen Y.

Have the educated underemployed
instigated most rebellions?

...The immediate problem is psychological: the sudden, shocking realization that work as it is constituted in the early 21st century is going to be hell.

If fewer applicants apply for relatively expensive higher education
could admissions standards and prices fall?

...Of course, there's always law school. Never mind that applications are at an all-time high and that thousands of legal positions at investment banking firms have disappeared forever. Never mind that recent Ivy League law school graduates are now working as file clerks, substitute school teachers, census takers. Never mind that in order to pay back the $200,000 it's going to cost you to go to law school, you'll need to land one of those plum legal jobs at...one of those other firms that are no longer hiring because they owe so much to the lawyers they already did hire to defend them from lawsuits brought by the government's lawyers...

...Good luck getting your parents to pay for that one.

Joe Queenan
Wall Street Journal

George Hartzman