Just from my own personal experience & following that of my friends, I've long felt that the most ignored problem in this awful economy is that of the recent college graduate. It lately seems that college is just an expensive holding place after which you end up with a job requiring nothing more than a GED that pays very little, if any, above minimum wage. I can't even begin to count how many friends I have with undergraduate degrees in Business, Public Relations, Biology, Marketing, etc that feel stuck. We were all told to attend college in order to secure an "adult" job that would allow for a comfortable life, but that seems to have just been an illusion. Job openings are few & far between these days, and when an entry level position does become available a recent grad is no longer competing solely against other inexperienced grads. No, you're now forced into a pool with those who have been laid off after 3-5 years of work and are willing to take a pay cut just to get back in the game. Well, if you were an employer & got to choose between a candidate with no experience & one with 3-5 years for the same pay, which would you choose?
It's a generation in borderline crisis, and a problem that is basically being completely ignored. We see stories about the moms that lose jobs & struggle to feed families, and we see stories about the middle-aged man who gets laid off after being with a company for 25 years, yet there's nothing in the news concerning the state of the generation that people often reference when talking about the "future of our country". Sure, it doesn't seem like a problem right now because most recent grads don't have a family to support just yet, and they even might be lucky enough to still be able to depend on their own parents for support. But that can only last for so long. The situation now is crippling the future of our workforce and a majority of the population is completely blinded to it...
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