Approximately 53% of college grads are un- or under-employed. The vast majority of students leave school with crippling debt. We tell young people to go to college, in order to get a job – but they graduate with a debt burden they cannot survive under, and are unable to get a job due to market forces well outside of their control.
These kids did everything “right” – they listened to the advice of guidance counselors, pursued the education they were told to, tried to contribute to the economy. When they succeed, they are the embodiment of the “American dream.” But when they can’t afford to pay rent, cannot get a job, and their credit is destroyed from inability to pay back their gargantuan loans, they’re labeled “lazy,” or “irresponsible.” When they move back into their parent’s home because they have no other options, they are derided as being a generation of “moochers.” They should just “pick themselves up by their bootstraps and WORK for it, like the generation before them.” But the generation before them had vastly different circumstances.
Since 1978, the cost of attending college in America has increased 1,120 percent. The financial model for higher education is broken, as tuition costs are rising faster than inflation. How can students expect to survive on the bad faith advice of guidance from a prior generation? Bootstraps rhetoric is all well and good for those who don’t want to face reality, but it hardly puts food on the table (unless millennials are expected to eat bootstraps for breakfast).
These young students, as individuals, are not responsible for the failings of a national economy – the national economy (and those who came before, and contributed to it) failed them. It is unfair to blame them for the inability to solve a problem over which an entire generation – much less any one individual person – has no control.
I firmly believe that higher education should be available to everyone who desires it, and access should not be limited on the basis of price or privilege. However, the frequency at which young people are told by their elders to pursue college and graduate schools is worrisome, as is the dangerous myth of meritocracy that follows in its wake. Because, like it or not, education is simply not the pathway to success it once was.