Graduation Mash-Up: Reality-Check Time
Three To Read
Sharp Observations On Our Graduating Class
Sharp Observations On Our Graduating Class
By C.J. Westerberg
1) Do check out this week's The New Yorker with a poignant cover illustration complementing Simon Rich's "Your New College Graduate: A Parents' Guide", a farcical quick-read on unemployed college grads at home with mom and dad. The consensus here at The Daily Riff is that it didn't float our boat, especially for this publication - think it would have been more entertaining a few years ago or if the author had taken a different angle (maybe a student's POV?). What's your riff on this? Yay or Nay?
2) Joe Queenan's "A Lament For The Class of 2010" from The Wall Street Journal, on the other side of the spectrum, is a chilling must-read portrayal of the new reality faced by recent grads. He begins his story with a "smart, talented, enterprising young man" with his newly-minted Ivy League degree who was both living at home and "working" as an intern at a NYC street fair. Queenan continues:
" . . . Over the next few weeks, hundreds of thousands of Millennials will graduate from institutions of higher learning. They will celebrate for several days, perhaps several weeks. 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