Dispatch from the New Lost Generation

Confession: I am a college graduate. Five years ago this May I graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. Now you might surmise from the previous sentence that I have parlayed my opportunity to study at a world-class institution like Penn into admission to a prestigious professional or graduate school. Or maybe I took my talents to Wall Street, where I am currently earning an exorbitant salary toiling for a megabank like Goldman Sachs or UBS. Perhaps I spent a few years traveling the world and am now at work composing the next great American novel. At any rate, you imagine, I have only just begun to turn my version of the American Dream into a beautiful reality. 

I wish I could say that I lived up to these hypothetical expectations; alas, I could not. 

It turns out that I reached the pinnacle of my life’s achievement when I arrived at the top of the stage to receive my college diploma (actually, it was a piece of paper that informed me my diploma would be in the mail in a few months). Since that time, my life has been marked by a series of failures. Immediately after college, I entered the education profession for want of a better option and, for the lesser part of two years, tried to forge an identity as a teacher in the crucible of a high school classroom. Although I possessed a comfortable level of knowledge about the subjects which I taught, I was never able to master the complicated art of classroom management. Needless to say, it was not long before some of my students were able to take advantage of my weaknesses as an educator and compromise my lessons. I abandoned my teaching career embittered, depressed, and humiliated. 

Let’s fast forward to the present. I am currently working at a small beer distributor, where I employ the intellectual skills I cultivated at an Ivy League institution to assist me in determining the best way to lower a keg of Pabst to the bottom of a deep basement. I can state candidly that I am no closer to finding, let alone navigating, my life’s path than I was when I began my course of studies at that august institution in University City nine years ago. Worse, I can no longer ward off the sinking feeling that my liberal arts degree has been rendered useless in an increasingly utilitarian job market. I wonder if the only benefit I have attained from my education is the ability to articulate more clearly just how lost I truly am.    

Mine is but one of many stories of desperation and struggle to emerge from a group which some have christened the new “Lost Generation,” whose membership includes anyone who was cursed with the misfortune of graduating in the midst of the Great Recession. Some, like me, continue to seek the elusive compass that will provide them with a direction in life. With a dearth of available jobs, there is little opportunity to experiment until we find our niche. Others know exactly what they want to do and possess the necessary educational credentials, but cannot overcome the anemic economy. Bartenders who have graduated from law school and passed the bar exam practice the art of mixology rather than law; waiters and waitresses with nursing degrees wait tables instead of waiting on patients; store clerks with education degrees stock the shelves rather than steer our children toward a better future.    

We are a generation adrift and astray. We have so much to offer to the world, but the world seems to lack the resources to exploit our potential. Rather than serving as keys which we can use to open the doors of opportunity, our diplomas and advanced degrees have become burdensome albatrosses that only remind us of our inability to find success. 

Perhaps as the economy improves so will our fortune. Or maybe we will be discarded in favor of more recent college graduates, in which case we can adopt a new appellation: the Forgotten Generation.    

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