Post by raphael on May 29, 2010 0:26:58 GMT -5
I've got one graduating from college next year and will go into teaching and I just read an article where 100,000 teachers nationally will be laid off. Hmmmm!
No one needs you, Class of 2010
College grads face daunting obstacles that threaten to make them part of the first generation to fare worse than the one that spawned it.
By Joe Queenan, The Wall Street Journal
A few weeks ago I ran into one of my son's oldest friends. He had attended an Ivy League school, studying drama and music, and was now back living at home. He is a smart, talented, enterprising young man and I have always liked him, in part because he engages with adults in a way many young men do not. (For example, he actually makes eye contact.) I asked him if he had found a job yet and he replied, a bit sheepishly, "Not exactly."
Calculator: Are you saving enough for college?
He then explained that he was working as an intern at a street fair on the Lower East Side of New York City. An Ivy League education runs around $200,000, not counting meals and transportation. The internship paid about $250 a week. But presumably, it could lead to bigger things, like a full-time job at a street fair in New York.
Even so, it did sound like my son's friend was ever so slightly underemployed.
Over the next several weeks, hundreds of thousands of Millennials will graduate from institutions of higher learning. They will celebrate for several days, perhaps longer. 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.
They will console themselves with the thought that all this is but a speed bump on the road to success, that their inability to find work in a field that is even vaguely related to the discipline they trained in is only a fleeting setback.
articles.moneycentral.msn.com/CollegeAndFamily/CutCollegeCosts/no-one-needs-you-class-of-2010.aspx?page=1
College grads face daunting obstacles that threaten to make them part of the first generation to fare worse than the one that spawned it.
By Joe Queenan, The Wall Street Journal
A few weeks ago I ran into one of my son's oldest friends. He had attended an Ivy League school, studying drama and music, and was now back living at home. He is a smart, talented, enterprising young man and I have always liked him, in part because he engages with adults in a way many young men do not. (For example, he actually makes eye contact.) I asked him if he had found a job yet and he replied, a bit sheepishly, "Not exactly."
Calculator: Are you saving enough for college?
He then explained that he was working as an intern at a street fair on the Lower East Side of New York City. An Ivy League education runs around $200,000, not counting meals and transportation. The internship paid about $250 a week. But presumably, it could lead to bigger things, like a full-time job at a street fair in New York.
Even so, it did sound like my son's friend was ever so slightly underemployed.
Over the next several weeks, hundreds of thousands of Millennials will graduate from institutions of higher learning. They will celebrate for several days, perhaps longer. 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.
They will console themselves with the thought that all this is but a speed bump on the road to success, that their inability to find work in a field that is even vaguely related to the discipline they trained in is only a fleeting setback.
articles.moneycentral.msn.com/CollegeAndFamily/CutCollegeCosts/no-one-needs-you-class-of-2010.aspx?page=1