Advice For Students From Beyond Graduation

People from our parents' generation laugh about the shortsighted advice given to them when they were college-age kids ready to start building their lives. They say that all their parents, teachers and guidance counselors encouraged them to go to school and study law, medicine and engineering. Why? Because the nation needed its doctors, lawyers and engineers in those days, so they assumed there would be jobs waiting for them. Just a few years down the road, the professions America really needed were teachers, nurses and computer programmers. It's not that our folks were intentionally misguided, just that they were given well-meaning but ultimately outdated information. As for our generation, we got a similar, if more troubling, serving of bad advice.

If you're a college student and you're paying attention to the national economy (which you should be), you'll notice that our job market is pretty brutal these days. It hasn't been this bad since the crash in 1982, except that the country recovered from that financial trauma rather quickly. In Michigan, the state hit hardest by our current crisis, the unemployment rate is as high as 15%. That's getting uncomfortably close to Depression-era jobless numbers. Nationally we're hovering around 10% unemployment, but that's an average of all demographics. If you're in your 20's, you have a much higher likelihood of being left out of the job market completely.

But I'm not here to scare you (or just to scare you), I'm here to give you star students some advice your parents, teachers and career counselors didn't. If you're like me, you grew up being told that hard work, persistence and a good education would get you work in this big, competitive world. They told you that because for them that was true. If you were born after 1980, not so much. For you, some old-fashioned bootstrapping using some new-fangled technology is a better bet than launching a carpet bombing campaign with your thin resume on every job site and with every recruiting agency in your city.

Considering that a large chunk of the jobs out there classified as "Entry Level" that haven't been outsourced to cheap labor on the other side of the world also absurdly require several years of experience, it may be a better expenditure of time and energy to start your own business after college. It may mean sharing an apartment with more people than your school tried to cram into your freshman dorm room and making ends meet by waiting tables, but in the long run our generation will probably be more successful if we remove ourselves from the existing corporate system entirely.

Starting a home-based online business is cheap, if a bit labor intensive. Maybe it's selling pies and brownies baked in your own kitchen, maybe it's freelance web design or a podcast that builds a big enough fanbase to get sponsorship. Regardless of what your business is, you can potentially escape the dead-end corporate system that doesn't seem capable or willing to give you work anyway.

When history looks back at us turn-of-the-century youth, I hope it will see the ambitious, small business entrepeneurs who saved themselves with innovation and elbow grease, not a lost generation that suffered for someone else's mistakes and our own lack of foresight.