A lot of articles have been directed to the college grads of 2011. I agree: You drew the short straw. It stinks. You were truly engaged in the race to nowhere for the past eight years.
Turning bitter, having a chip on your shoulder is way too easy, though. It's time to pull up your socks and use the skills you didn't learn in the lecture hall.
My best friend from college sent me the link to her son's blog. He just graduated from college and was whining and warning his college buddies about the impermeability of today's job market, about the worthlessness of their college degrees, about the lousy deal their parents had handed them, because they dared to instill hope for a bright future and pay for such an expensive, useless education. Really.
The young man is a bartender now. He despairs that he will never live as well as his parents did, and do. Fortunate for him, his parents must have read one of the multitude of parenting books, conscientiously purchased at Borders some years ago, that told mom and dad it was their duty to prove their acceptance and love of their young adult offspring by welcoming him back into the nest when things didn't go according to plan. Fortunate for him, his father wasn't mine, who told me a year before graduation that I had to get a job, that I couldn't come home, that the locks would be changed. And come June of my graduation year, the locks were indeed changed.
What this young man doesn't know is how his mother lived in an 800 sq. ft apartment with five other recent grads, while she worked full time and went to graduate school at NYU nights for a few years. I don't know how she ate or bought clothes for work, but I can assure you there were no $3.50 a day frappucinos. He doesn't remember his parents both working like maniacs when he was a baby, as they tried to pay their rent and child care bills. He doesn't know the insanely long hours his dad endured to make partner in his firm, so that one day, he'd be able to pay college tuition.
We graduated into what was arguably the worst economic environment, worst job market in recent memory-- that is --until today. More than any other part of my college years, I vividly remember the anxiety of the countdown to graduation and inevitable joblessness and homelessness. In this respect, I sympathize with this generation of young 20-somethings. The paradigm has indeed shifted. They music stopped; there were no chairs.
But for goodnessakes, please stop whining! We had it rough. Our parents, coming out of the Great Depression and WWII had it rougher. Here's the difference between us and our kids: we didn't expect our parents to pay for college so we could have four years of a great time, enriching summer programs, and semesters overseas. We didn't expect someone to pick up the pieces after our four-year party. Everyone I know who went to college expected to work hard, to do their parents proud, to be ready to fly solo when he or she finished. We didn't expect to jump into a high-paying, cushy job on par with our elders simply because we showed up with our lattes in hand. We expected to do crap work for many, many years at very low pay until more new grads came into our workplace, and we had a little less crap to do. I had many friends who rode out the dismal job market in graduate school. There was still some money to be found in academia. In the magic that is Facebook, I've reconnected with so many college chums who found their permanent home in a university somewhere.
All I can say to our college-age kids who want it all now, who are crushed that their big plans haven't (and probably won't) be realized, is this: It's about time you learned life defies plans. It's about time you learn to stand on your own. Yeah. You're right. As parents of this generation, we are guilty of trying to make your life easier than ours. ( and ours was pretty easy compared to our parents.) We didn't heed the pages about letting you fail and figure it out on your own. Life doesn't get any easier than it is right now; no one else is relying on you.
Dad had it right. Without the expectation of a safety net, I got down to business. I took a job that I really didn't want, but it paid the bills. And who got a job they wanted? It wasn't writing, literature or publishing. It wasn't glamorous, but that first job as a mainframe programmer set me up for a lifelong career. Things didn't work out too bad.
Advice to mom and dad: change the locks. You're doing your kid a favor.
