Congrats on Graduating— Now Life Starts to Suck

Alexandra Petri weighs in on sometimes hard-to-hear truths

(NEWSER) - Wish you could ditch the inspirational commencement speech for something a bit more realistic? So does Alexandra Petri. But she wasn’t satisfied with Charles Wheelan’s recent list in the Wall Street Journal , “10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You,” because she kinda remembered hearing all of the observations it contained ... in commencement speeches. So, in the Washington Post , she offers up “the 10 things they really don’t tell you at graduation.”

• Get ready to be unemployed and living with mom and dad. She’s not trying to be cruel, just stating facts, she explains, and she has the statistics to prove it. Here's one: "29% of 25-to-34 year-olds live in what the poll-taker was kind enough to refer to as "multi-generational living arrangements" rather than "your old room with all the anime posters and Admiral Ackbar figures carelessly splayed on every surface."

Schools worry more about luxe sports fields and pharmaceutical patents

(NEWSER) - It's a hot question these days: Is college worth it? But writing for the Los Angeles Times, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa don't beat the same old "expensive! bad job market!" angle into the ground. Instead they wonder if it's worth it because it's just becoming so darn easy to graduate. Arum and Roksa, sociology professors at NYU and UVa, respectively, tracked thousands of students at more than two dozen schools, and what they found smells pretty academic lite: In an average semester, 32% of kids had no classes that required reading more than 40 pages a week; 36% studied solo for just five hours, or less, a week. And a third—shockingly—showed no substantial gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing ability after their four years. More»

'Finding yourself' isn't step one

(NEWSER) - As another class graduates from colleges across America, David Brooks reflects on a generation “ill served by their elders”: We haven’t given them the skills to “navigate” an unpredictable world. “This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history,” Brooks notes in the New York Times . “Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.” Problem is, “upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured.” More»

Wheaton College in Massachusetts—not Illinois— takes mistake in stride

(NEWSER) - Ann Curry is impressed with Wheaton College grads Billy Graham and Wes Craven, she said during her commencement address at Wheaton College. Trouble is, she was at the Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and Graham and Craven went to the school of the same name in Illinois. "I am mortified by my mistake," the Today show anchor says in an open letter to the Massachusetts college's community. More»

Class of 2010 has dim prospects and unrealistic expectations

(NEWSER) - A meeting with a childhood friend of his twentysomething son—an Ivy League grad making $250 a week as an intern with a street fair—got Joe Queenan thinking. His inescapable conclusion: the millennials are screwed. "With the obvious exception of youngsters born during the Great Depression," Queenan writes for the Wall Street Journal , "no generation in American history faces more daunting obstacles." More»