Ah, the sweet scent of May—not of spring blossoms, but of the collective rot of millions of dreams being incinerated in the dumpster fire we call the 'modern economy.' Another crop of graduates has emerged from the hallowed, ivy-covered debt-factories, clutching overpriced pieces of vellum that signify nothing more than their successful navigation of a four-year bureaucracy. They stand there, grinning in their rented polyester, blissfully unaware that the 'bottom' hasn't just fallen out of the job market—it has been liquidated, packaged into a derivative, and sold back to their parents' pension funds. It’s a beautiful, symmetrical cycle of failure that would be poetic if it weren't so profoundly pathetic.

We are told by the stenographers of the status quo that the market is 'cooling,' a charming euphemism for the fact that entry-level positions now require the experience of a seasoned veteran and the salary of a Victorian chimney sweep. The graduates are 'screwed,' not because of a temporary dip in the business cycle, but because the very concept of the professional middle class has become an antique. The Left, in its infinite capacity for performative signaling, shrieks about student debt forgiveness as if erasing the balance on a predatory loan somehow fixes the fact that the degree itself is a credential for a world that no longer exists. They want to subsidize the scam without dismantling the scammers, ensuring the university-industrial complex keeps its bloated administrative class fat on taxpayer-funded tuition. It is a classic move: treat the symptom, ignore the gangrene, and demand a standing ovation for your empathy.

Meanwhile, the Right—bless their lead-poisoned hearts—bellows about 'learning a trade,' as if the entire global economy can be sustained by a billion plumbers fixing the same three leaking pipes in houses nobody can afford to buy. They mock the 'liberal arts' while their own children struggle to read a balance sheet that isn't written in crayon. They worship at the altar of 'hard work' while ignoring that the 'hard work' of today is often just digital serfdom for a multinational corporation that would replace a human being with a literal toaster if the toaster had a better LinkedIn profile and didn't ask for healthcare. It’s a binary of idiocy: one side wants to fund the collapse, the other wants to pretend it’s 1954 and we still manufacture things other than resentment and software bugs.

The truth is far more clinical and far more depressing. The university system has transitioned from an educational endeavor to a real estate hedge fund with a side hustle in sports and light teaching. They’ve inflated the cost of admission to fund a bloated administrative class whose only job is to invent new ways to justify their own existence. And the graduates? They are the collateral. They’ve spent four years learning to 'deconstruct' power structures only to find themselves utterly powerless against an HR algorithm that filters for keywords they weren't taught because their professors haven't seen the inside of a private sector office since the Carter administration. They are over-educated in theory and under-equipped for a reality that views them as an avoidable overhead cost.

The 'bottom falling out' is the inevitable conclusion of a society that treated human intelligence as a commodity to be mined and then wondered why the soil turned to dust. Companies now look at a Bachelor's degree not as a sign of competence, but as a basic filter to ensure the candidate can tolerate four years of pointless busywork—a prerequisite for the forty years of pointless busywork that awaits them, should they be lucky enough to find a cubicle. But even that cubicle is shrinking. AI—the latest plaything of the Silicon Valley sociopaths—is ready to replace the very 'knowledge work' these students were promised. Why hire a debt-ridden twenty-two-year-old to write mediocre copy or analyze spreadsheets when a server farm in Utah can do it for the price of a cooling fan and zero complaints about 'work-life balance'?

The graduates are 'screwed' because the game was rigged before they were born, yet they were gaslit into believing the meritocracy was functional. They are the victims of a generational bait-and-switch. The Boomers, who bought houses for the price of a ham sandwich, now sit on hiring boards demanding 'passion' and 'hustle' from a generation that can't afford rent. It’s a comedy of errors where nobody is laughing, except perhaps the bankers who are collecting interest on the $1.7 trillion in student debt that anchors these kids to the seafloor. So, congratulations, Class of 2024. You’ve earned your stripes. You’ve played the game, followed the rubrics, and checked the boxes. Your reward is a front-row seat to the collapse of the professional class. Don't worry, though; the recruiters will be in touch just as soon as they finish automating your dreams into a more efficient, low-cost alternative. Until then, you can always find comfort in the fact that your 'critical thinking' skills will allow you to perfectly articulate why you’re starving.