"The Best Minds of My Generation are Wilting Away"

This spring, I will be graduating with honors from a top-ten university. I should be excited about my future, yet, I find myself terrified.

With the release of new employment numbers on Friday March 4th, we at FrumForum decided that it was time to listen to the voices of the young as they face the challenges of this economic crisis. Over the next days, in an exclusive series, we will be featuring a number of their first-person stories in this space. If their experience is yours, we welcome you to join the conversation at Editor@FrumForum.com.

Click here for David Frum’s introduction to this series.

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I will be graduating, with honors, from a top-ten university this spring with a degree in the social sciences.  Yet, I am terrified.  Despite significant efforts, I have little to show for the endless charade of networking, cover letter rewriting and interviews.

Entry level office jobs are gone.  The save-the-world non-profit jobs for the young idealists are gone.  The research gigs for future scientists and academics have dwindled in lockstep with shrinking endowments.  From my vantage point, the anecdotal evidence is that students are either hiding out in graduate school or are hired to run mindless econometrics in Excel for banks, the social value of which is dubious at best.

The heavily moralized view--that recent graduates are lazy, immature or simply non-sufficiently Randian--is so far from the truth that it makes me physically ill when I read such babble.  The past generation was a middle-class built on the compromises of the welfare state and now those very successes are simply indefensible in our political discourse, as if they are a hop, skip and a jump away from a totalitarian gulag.

I've watched as some of the best minds of my generation simply wilt away.  They take mediocre jobs: pouring coffee and shelving books.  They drink what little money they make and spend their days in regret, at the ripe age of 22.  This is true of humanities and natural science graduates alike.

The real danger, an argument that I have yet to see effectively championed, is the profound opportunity costs our society faces in the future.   The next generation of professionals, from CEOs to artists, are being systematically denied the work experience that would undoubtedly serve them and our country in the future.  The failure of our political leadership is blatantly transparent: the narrow "Winning the Future" sloganeering gives me as much hope as Mitch McConnell's blood-red partisanship.

Then again, perhaps the saddest thing about my lost generation is that we will not produce a Hemingway, a Scott Fitzgerald or an Eliot.  We'll just have to tweet about it.

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