Now is the season of the college graduations. All across the country, 22-year-olds and their parents will listen to local politicians say things like, “The world you are entering is a world ready for you, the world you are entering needs you. It is ready for your contribution and it requires your leadership.”
Except that at the most basic, human resources level the world actually doesn’t need more graduates. As Joe Queenan writes in the Wall Street Journal:
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 bodegas.
The problem is that there really aren’t jobs now or at any rate, in Queenan’s words, not the sort of jobs “anyone in his right mind would have spent $100,000 to $200,000 to land.”
There is, oddly, no real rainbow at the end of this storm. Except that, um, insurance companies can no longer deny kids coverage for preexisting conditions. It looks like that’s about the only thing that’s improved for college graduates since last year.[Image via]
