3.8 GPA, high SATs, 4 year degree and living with Mom at age 25... [View all]

Got a Christmas card from a friend and she included a tidbit that both of her sons have returned to live in her house.

I don't know what to say to her. I feel bad. She did all she could to prepare them for careers; from over-seeing homework to guiding them toward scholarships. The older one got into a great college, sailed through and is now pouring coffee at an in-store cafe'. It breaks my heart to see her son spend the prime years of starting his career in a part-time minimum wage job. There are opportunities for 20-somethings that you don't get again later in life.

When I got out of college the country was in the middle of the Reagan recession. Jobs being lost at a high rate. We all thought we were going to starve but those conditions look good compared to now. I was lucky enough to start a job the Monday after I finished my last exam -- a real estate firm, doing database work, I got some on job related training and a promotion to supervisor within the first year. Within 18 months I was working in the industry I wanted to be in (which is not real estate).

I can't imagine what it would have been like to bounce back into my mother's home 3 years after college. On some level I just think I would never have done it but you never know what you can do until you HAVE to do it. I went broke a couple times in my life and never asked my parents for help.

I'm at a very different stage of my career so I ask -- Is the economy so bad that newly minted, work-for-next-to-nothing college grads can't get a start? And if so, why are we blindly filling colleges with teens who come out the other end with debt and no job?