The economy avoids graduating students as if they are Kafka's bugs!

Students seem to avoid coming to my office in the spring term much more than how they dodge me in fall and winter, because now is when I am even more interested in their answers to my second favorite question, “so, what is your plan for the summer?” My favorite question being “so, what do you plan to do after graduating?”

If experience has taught me anything, then I should have quit asking these questions a long time ago—most students would rather that I don’t trouble them about these issues. Yet, I do.

Almost always, it seems like what students want is to simply get the heck out of the university. Thus, every single instance that I engage in this back‐and‐forth with them, I am reminded of Franz Kafka’s short story, The Departure. It is a short one‐paragraph story that I often share with students:

I ordered my horse to be brought from the stables. The servant did not understand my orders. So I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and mounted. In the distance I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me and asked: "Where is the master going?" "I don't know," I said, "just out of here, just out of here. Out of here, nothing else, it's the only way I can reach my goal." "So you know your goal?" he asked. "Yes," I replied, "I've just told you. Out of here‐‐that's my goal."

If at all, I feel a greater urgency to share that Kafka story with students because of the brutal economic conditions that await them even as they express their goal to get “just out of here.” The Great Recession might have ended with an anemic recovery, but is not by any means a healthy economy that awaits the twenty‐somethings. Even internship opportunities, which were in the past guaranteed pathways to careers, seem to have dried up.

Over the past couple of years, in my visits to the stores and during the travels, I have met fresh out of college youth working at the checkout counters of grocery stores, washing cars at rental places, and waiting tables. None of these require a college degree, of course. But, they work at these places because it beats not working at all. One—a recent psychology grad—expressed her worry when she said, “I don’t want to become a lifer here.”

Most students, once past their bubbly freshman years, are well aware of this reality, which is also why they wish that I would not ask them about their plans. The non‐traditional students who are back in school because of the atrocious employment conditions outside always seem to walk around with worried expressions.  One can easily sympathize with students, therefore, for their immediate goal to simply get away from me!

Worry is what we should all do. According to a recent report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, about 48 percent of the employed college graduates are in jobs that do not require a four‐year degree. More than a third of those occupations did not even need anything more than a high school diploma. Such a high level of underemployment after a significant amount of time and money invested in a college degree should worry us all.

Just when I thought I had seen everything regarding underemployment of college graduates, I felt horrified to read about a McDonald's in Winchendon, Massachusetts, advertising for a full time cashier position that was restricted to college graduates. Even worse, it required one to two years of prior experience!

My comforting words to students are nearly Polyannaish—“at least you are not in Spain where the youth unemployment is more than fifty percent.” I tell them that even Ivy League graduates are having a tough time, hoping that misery loves privileged company.

The real tragedy is that despite all these trends over the years, we seem to be continuing with college degree as a cure for all, with more determination than ever. Within this collegiate education, it disappoints and depresses me that it is possible for students to have never read anything by Kafka when, ironically, the economy treats new graduates as if they have become the monstrous bugs that Kafka wrote about inThe Metamorphosis.

John Maynard Keynes famously said “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”  Have we not accumulated enough facts for us to change our minds regarding this expensive approach to getting every kid to college?

A tired, but a much younger me,
by my office door in 2002