I always love listening to parents and older figures criticize our generation, as if we’re somehow fundamentally different from anyone else when they were younger. Text messaging is making us horrible communicators, the internet is killing our initiative, and facebook is ruining our appreciation of privacy, etc.

Authority figures have been criticizing their subordinates for centuries (you don’t have to look too hard to find an example in Socrates), but in spite of how trivial some of these points of contention might be, there are definitely quite a few differences between our generation and the generation of our parents. We can see this no more clearly than by looking at where most of us go after college.

According to a recent New York Times article, “Generation Limbo: Waiting it Out,” recent college graduates are not following the same career trajectories that yesterday’s professional class did. The Times calls us a generation in limbo: We’re the overly educated “20-somethings, whose careers are stuck in neutral, coping with dead-end jobs and listless prospects.”

That’s a pretty rough picture. And though that description doesn’t necessarily apply to most of us who are still in school, it won’t be long until we enter the so-called “real world” too. According to a recent Rutgers survey, the percentage of graduates who described their first job as their “career” was at 30 percent before 2008. Now, that number has fallen to about 22 percent.

In a lot of ways, this was unavoidable. 2008 brought about the worst economic crisis since before most of us were born, and it doesn’t look like the unemployment numbers are going to tilt in our favor any time soon. Moreover, the percentage of people with degrees in this country has also risen significantly since when our parents were in school, so the job market is especially competitive. Graduate school has effectively become a given if one expects to be compete, but even that becomes an impossibility for many; one can only take out so many student loans before organ harvesting becomes requisite to pay the bills.

But it’s not just a depressed market that’s altering where we’re looking for careers. For some strange reason, our generation has seen it fit to look for “fulfillment” in a job (a novel concept, I know). A lot of us aren’t satisfied with nine to five hours, worrying about 401k’s, and supporting a family immediately upon graduation. And that notion is supported by the culture we live in too. At graduation commencement speeches we’re told to follow our dreams wherever they take us, do what makes us happy, go out and make a difference; all of these are fine little nuggets of wisdom, but they’re not exactly helpful advice when you have to pay rent to live in your own parents’ house.

I’m don’t claim to speak from some enlightened perspective though. As an English major, I tell most people when they ask me what I want to do after I graduate that I plan to starve. My job prospects don’t look much better than anyone else’s. Maybe some of us will enjoy our permanently transient state of employment upon finishing school. Or maybe the nation’s GDP will quintuple overnight and the job market will open up again. What’s most likely though is that if any of us want some guaranteed financial security it’s going to require a lot of extra schooling that we might decry as distracting us from our own personal “fulfillment.” Then again, a lot of us could probably use the extra humility (myself included), so maybe our grim job prospects aren’t such a bad thing after all.

Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]