Columnist Laments Unemployed Law Grads and Broken Unspoken Contract
As factories closed and the economy changed, young people were repeatedly told that the way to succeed was to get an education.
But that advice hasn’t helped many of today’s law and college graduates, according to columnist Bill McClellan of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. It’s the No. 1 topic of conversation among people his age, he says. McClellan’s daughter and a lawyer friend both told him of difficult times for law graduates, who are saddled with student debt on graduation.
“It’s bad enough that the factories are closed, bad enough that the secretarial pools have gone dry,” he writes. “But that has been happening for some time now. This other thing is newer—unemployed college graduates, unemployed law school graduates. It’s as if some unspoken intergenerational contract has been broken.”
McClellan says he wasn’t a particularly dedicated journalism student, and he left Arizona State University before getting a degree. Still, he got a job. “That was a good thing about those days,” he writes. “You didn’t have to set the world on fire to get a job.”
“Today even good students are having a difficult time getting jobs. Even good students from good schools are having trouble.”
