The Chagrin of a soon-to-be college grad

In a word, I am DISTRESSED. The US economy is out of control. Our country’s debt is skyrocketing (bought by China Inc.), Americans’ personal debt is following suit to lenders, and what is normally our most valuable asset, our home, is, in some cases, worth half of the mortgage borrowed in its namesake. What with the skyrocketing price of oil, on which the economy has been stupidly founded, we are in real danger of economic disaster on the scale of the Great Depression. The dollar is plummeting in value, while prices continue to soar, in recognition of that fact.

All of this means different things for different people. For the baby boomers (the ones who are not billionaires,) this manifests itself as a shrinking nest egg for retirement. (Perhaps shrinking is too weak – shriveling.) For many corporate CEOs, the economy in its current state is a cash cow. Even when their companies fail, they walk away with millions of dollars in severance. For middle-aged professionals, perhaps they can no longer depend on returning to work tomorrow.

But for people like me, (or the person I will be at the end of this academic year,) that is, fresh graduates looking to begin their professional lives, the economy is perhaps even more bleak. We are in desperate need for a job to start repaying all the debt we have accumulated over the four to six years we’ve spent in undergrad and graduate schools. We were promised the world… “Get an education, and you can do whatever your heart desires.” Some crock of bullshit that has turned out to be. Lending institutions have taken advantage of our naiveté, cashing in on all those student loans we needed to fund our study abroad that would “pay itself back in a few years.” Yet another lie financial and academic institutions have worked together to propagate.

Unfortunately for us, there are no jobs that can help us pay those loans back. We students, who followed our dreams, pursuing liberal arts degrees with no clear career track like professional degrees, are stuck working in the service sector, or maybe, nonprofit sector, earning barely the minimum wage, and hardly a livable wage. Furthermore, those jobs exist in bulk only in big cities, where the cost of living greatly exceeds what the wages we are offered can sustain.

I suppose all we young people can do is resign ourselves to destitution, and hate our baby boomer parents and grand parents for enjoying higher standards of living than we ever will.