What makes millennials extraordinary

Academic procession at the University of Canterbury graduation ceremony 2004. Photo taken by User:Clawed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s graduation season, and while it’s exciting to begin another chapter in your life, leaving the shelter of college and entering today’s job market is still daunting to say the least.

This NYTimes Op-Ed column written by Charles M. Blow lists challenges that he believes graduates will have to face — challenges that might make them want to purposely fail their last finals and stay in college forever:

Dear College Graduates… (nytimes.com)

In his column, Blow cites how more people are graduating with college degrees (decreasing their value in the job market) and how employers are outsourcing jobs to foreign countries such as China and India.

He also discusses the rising costs of basic goods, polarization of American politics, increase of the income gap, and how student debt and lack of employment means graduates are putting off major life decisions.

Whether or not you agree with Blow’s assertions, I hope you take pride in his final paragraphs, in which he praises millennials for their optimism and their desire to improve the world around them:

What gives me hope is that despite this dire environment, young people remain more optimistic than anyone else. Some of that may simply be the intrinsic glow of youth, but I believe that with this generation, something more is afoot.

This is a generation of people who have come of age in an era of overlapping traumas — terrorism and wars and recession. They have also come of age in changing times, and are more tolerant and less punitive in their social view. They see this country, and the world, differently than we older folks do. Theirs is an America waiting to be made better, not one that is simply, and irreversibly, getting worse.