Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. More important, their lives have been perversely structured. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders.
