No One Need Apply, Part Two

CNN recently ran an article about the employment situation in Zimbabwe.  Apparently, the position of hangman has been vacant for years, but plenty of people are interested in it, just to guarantee a regular paycheck.  I don't know the social attitude toward capital punishment in Zimbabwe, but it seems clear that the social attitude toward being unemployed shares an awful lot with the United States, as large numbers of people take jobs well below their professional skill level and education just to get by.  One reason for the riots in Tunisia was a large class of former college students that were unable to find any work related to their education.

I've been waiting for some years for the "higher education bubble" to burst in America.  Millions of young adults head off to college, still armed with the out of date mindset of a generation before (get a degree, someone will give you a job), all-too-willing to accept decades of debt slavery based on student loans underwritten with bad government debt.  Four years later, or maybe six or eight, these same young adults find themselves with an inescapable debt (bankruptcy laws don't apply) and fewer and fewer job prospects.  At my local chain bookstore, the staff consists largely of English majors who weren't able to find anything else but a minimum-wage job working a register and finding books on a shelf.  This isn't necessarily confined to degrees which don't directly translate to professional training, either -- plenty of people with accounting degrees, law degrees, etc, are facing increasingly poor employment prospects. 

There's a tendency to play the "blame the victim" game here, that people should've known that things sometimes come with strings attached and that there's no guarantee of success.  However, what prospective students didn't realize -- and what our civilization as a whole is still failing to comprehend -- that the ground has shifted beneath their feet, that the world which they were raised in, and people still believe in, simply doesn't exist anymore.  Lots of things are clear in the rearview, but maybe not so much when they're around the next corner. 

It does beg the question of how things will change socially, as we have an increasingly large educated class with little hope of success or life beyond trying to figure out how to pay their minimum loan payments and not find themselves arrested for not coming up with the cash to Sallie Mae or whoever.  Will we see a generation of "refuseniks" arise, who simply don't pay back their loans and form communities around this common burden?  Or will they form political action groups to try to have mass student loan forgiveness?  In an age when we're willing to bail out banks and given planeloads (literally) of dollars to foreign dicators, the latter idea doesn't seem so outlandish.  Finally, will they be primary contributors to political disruption and mass dissent?

If anything, we can see that when the collapse of our systems is in the offing, then like the chaos of a collapsing universe, all sorts of new patterns emerge and things which were once unthinkable become commonplace.  This was the view when the Soviet Union was headed off the edge of the cliff and it wasn't unheard of for soldiers occupying Eastern Europe to be picking over the refuse in garbage dumps for the essentials of life.  It doesn't take much speculation to see that we're on the same track and that, if anything, we flew a lot higher and have a lot farther to fall before it's all over.