A fine 20th century education

I am currently witness to the nauseating roller coaster that is the modern job search. As I watch my husband struggle to find employment, I have realized that my circle of friends' costly college educations of the 1990s did not prepare us in the slightest for the economic world we entered upon graduation. I don't fault professors for this. We entered school in 1995 as 18-year-olds steeped in experiences of our parents and older siblings, examples of how to succeed in a world where you looked for jobs in the newspaper and could somewhat count on keeping as long as they were white collar. The Internet was barely more than a toy for computer geeks, and "outsourcing" had yet to be coined. When we graduated in 1999, we entered a world where job boards were posted on the Internet, where you had to be specialized within an inch of your life to get noticed, and where jobs that seem impossible to outsource, i.e. English editing, go to the lowest Asian bidder. Our professors couldn't have seen this coming a mile away -- we certainly didn't.

And so now my husband is being low-balled for freelance jobs by Indians and Malaysians. Not that I fault them, either, they likely speak better English than many Americans. But how on earth is anyone supposed to get noticed on a Web site that spans thousands of profiles and several continents? And how can graduates network when their professors are still stymied in academia and don't know people in the working world that understand the current dynamics? We're almost too educated for our own good in this country: Thousands of M.A.s and PhDs lost in a sea of freelancers or waiting tables. As a friend recently pointed out, the service and construction industries are the biggest growth sectors in the fabulous Bush recovery.

It almost makes you long for the days of growing up with no greater expectations than doing what your father did before you.

Almost.