Things are not looking good on the economic front. Stocks are falling daily, the price of oil is rising steadily and defaulting mortgages are driving many people from their homes, as well as causing financial distress to banks across the country.
Previous generations preparing to graduate from college in these kinds of economic conditions would be feeling pretty glum right now. In fact, it might even be argued that the Seattle/slacker/grunge vibe of the early '90s was nothing more than a reaction by overeducated college kids to their impending unemployment and inability to pay off their student loans.
But employment prospects for graduates over the next few years are not entirely dim, especially for those willing to go into large corporations and government work.
Why?
Because the Baby Boomers are, at long last, on the way out. A person born in 1947 who graduated college in 1969 and went to work soon after will likely retire sometime in the next five to ten years, which means that their nice, cushy middle-management job will open up, creating a vacuum that needs to be filled. And while you, the upcoming graduate, may not get that job right out of the gate, there'll certainly be lower-level positions opening up as others move to fill the post-Boomer gap.
Of course, the jobs available to us will not be quite as attractive as the ones the Boomers got upon graduation, or the ones they're leaving behind. Employer-provided health care is becoming increasingly spotty, guaranteed-benefits retirement packages have gone the way of the dodo and an increasing share of corporate earnings goes not to the rank-and-file worker, but to corporate executives who exist far higher in the management hierarchy than most of us will ever climb.
But a job is a job.
And we'll need those jobs because, in addition to leaving us their jobs, the Boomers are leaving a mess of other things to deal with too. Forget the Social Security deficit - paying for the Medicare bills of the retiring and increasingly elderly Boomers will cost a fortune, as will dealing with the trillions of dollars of debt that got run up during the Reagan/Bush/Bush years and the as-yet unknown costs of dealing with all the carbon dioxide the Boomers dumped in the atmosphere.
In many ways, the boomers can be characterized by one of two images: the trippy hippies, drunk or stoned and weaving randomly from place to place, careless of the havoc they left in their wake, or the driven yuppies, earning and spending and consuming at unprecedented levels, greedily sucking the bottle dry, tossing the empty aside and demanding more. In contrast, we who follow the boomers are the janitors, resigned to sweeping up their mess for the rest of our careers.
Lucky us.
Jones is an electrical and computer engineering graduate student.
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