I'm a baby boomer, on the tail end, and I have a high schooler and a younger child. Although I find this generation quite lazy and spoiled, I think it's actually the pre baby boomers (my parents' generation) and the older baby boomers, who lived the American dream. My parents have pensions, health and dental insurance in retirement, a paid off home. They were able to save. Me, I'll have a small pension, but not much else, especially, after the kids go to school. I'll be lucky if Medicaid and Social security will even be there.

I managed to graduate in 1987 with two degrees, from two private institutions, and only $20,000 in debt. Now, that's absolute peanuts. As a single parent, I recently had to say at meeting with one child's guidance counselor, don't even mention small private colleges. I have no debt other than a mortgage, just recently got cable, sometimes wear hand-me-downs even though I'm a professional, and do things to scrimp, but it's still not going to give me much in my old age.

I think we are going to go back to the days when multiple generations lived together, financially supporting one another. With the lost of manufacturing, outsourcing overseas, government financial woes and health care issues(many of my peers in some way earn their living from the gov't or health care), I just don't see a good future for the young people of today. These kids will have it tough because many of them have had things handed to them. The Greatest Generation had their tough times first and reaped the benefits later in life. This generation, they'll have their good times first and then it will be downhill from there.

For an amusing take on this book, I highly recommend this article, which Slate posted over a month ago:

http://www.slate.com/id/2134007/

It's a good thing for both Republicans and Democrats that their children can't read numbers nor understand history. If they could see what the Republicans are doing, and the Democrats are letting them do, children would rise up and smother their parents in their sleep. The individual debt that Generation Debt has personally incurred is chump change compared to the national debt that their parents will leave them as an inverse birthright.

This is a manifestation of neoconservative economic policy.

When the guys in charge don't give a damn about anyone but

themselves this is one of the results.

The issues at stake here are not localized to federal loans and colleges gouging their underclassmen to help make yearly budgets. We have a brain drain in America which feeds our rapidly growing service-oriented economy and depletes the pool of solid candidates for jobs. The truth is that our dilapidated health-care "system" and out-dated, somewhat elitist educational system are fueling many of the problems.

The health-care debacle can be seen at many levels, from expensive coverage that depletes companies' reserves to lack of coverage that hobbles our workforce. The country is unhealthy and doesn't have good preventative medicine to keep us healthy.

Our college system is marketed as an avenue for career advancement as opposed to being what it should be, a solid, broad-based education.

In my opinion, the author makes a good point when she mentions that community colleges are on the front-lines. The sad truth, though, is that most companies offering high-paying jobs don't respect the education that people receive from those schools. I work at a major company in Silicon Valley. It would be difficult for a US citizen who didn't graduate from Stanford, Berkeley, or another big school from even getting an interview right now. You'd have to have a fantastic pedigree from other jobs before you'd even get past the review process.

I believe we need something more along the lines of what they have in Britain and Germany. As I understand it, they have a multi-tiered approach where testing at early ages determines to which kind of secondary school you go and whether you end up at university or at a technical or trade school. My Mom is a teacher. Some of her students will never be able to diagram a sentence properly or perform complex math. They may know a great deal about plants, be able to farm, know everthing anyone might want to know about cars, or work magic things out of wood and other materials. Why can't MORE OF THEM get respectable trade school or technical school educations in the same way we expect Universities to educate others? Would it not make sense to harness their skills at an early age instead of telling them they're stupid because they can't hack it in college or can't even get into college?

On top of all that, the secondary education that my European peers in college received far exceeded what I received at a very good public school in the US. This meant that they had the upper hand in college while I made up for lost time during my freshman year. Some of the foreign grad students even laughed at us when we described what we were taking during our first two years at school. Their mantra was that they had learned what we were just then learning before going to college.

The jobs won't get better until the skills of the people graduating get better and until corporations feel that they can afford to hire US workers. The cost-benefit analysis that many corporations perform when looking at the costs of health-care, cost-of-living, and skills has US workers at a general disadvantage. If our skills exceeded those of our foreign counterparts, they might help offset the other costs enough to convince corporations to hire the locals.

A recent copy of my alumni mag had me scratching my head. There were two very soft scientific articles. My university is known for top notch scientific research. Was the faculty finally caving in to conservative pressure? Some other readers had the same idea, and they blasted away in the letters section the next month.

And yet for years we have known that the liberal professors ran the system. Is there some reason to think that relationship would never change? Even in the sciences? Unless maybe you are willing to spend upwards of fifty thousand to get that education, so you can sleep in a tent in some third world country for ten years, do research, and publish your results, you should stick to basics.

The basic business degree is probably still worth the price, since a great deal of American business is run by people who really have no idea what the rules of business are? Is it ever a good time to be young, spare the temptations that the devil may care credit card companies have unleashed, aren't drugs and hiv a bigger worry? Your only real argument is that you are paying way too much for that degree, and the world is increasingly less interested in you when you have it, unless of course you can find yourself a plum civil service appointment, and as long as the Neocons are in charge your accreditation means less than your loyalty. (I suggest you read Beowolf to get a better idea of what I'm talking about). The rules are the same as they have always been, you need to be willing to sell your services to the highest bidder.