Feeling Bad? The View From '82 Should Help

Kevin Maney writes: Back from a week in Silicon Valley, I got talking with my 17-year-old daughter about these tough economic times -- when I remembered an essay that I sent on a whim to The New York Times in 1982, when I was a senior in college. The Times, miraculously, put it on its op-ed page on May 22, 1982, under the headline, "'82 Gown Isn't Going to Town."

Reading it now puts amazing perspective on the way people feel now, and on the ability of the U.S. economy to climb out of its gloomiest episodes in ways people can't possibly foresee.

The piece starts off with a rather bloated wind-up about how I didn't want to graduate and go into the real world. (Who ever does!?) But then it goes into the reasons why. Thank God things didn't turn out this way:

The bottom line is that we are among the first generation of college graduates who will most likely not be able to give our children things that we had when we were growing up.

My parents, for instance, bought a house in upstate New York, when they were in their early 20's. Unless I write a best seller and Hollywood buys the movie rights for megabucks, I won't be able to afford that same house until I'm milled-aged - if ever.

Many middle- and lower-income Americans in their late 20's and 30'sare unhappy because they thought they could have a better life than that. But as Ann Landers likes to say, identifying the problem is half the solution.

Many members of my graduating class have an advantage. We ate pasta dinners because meat was too expensive; we put up with Reaganomics and dollar-a-gallon gas. We're facing this upside-down version of the American dream, but at least we know it.

These middle-class students graduating with me - excluding the engineers and computer-science people who know they can get horrible grades and still start at $26,000 - seem ready to accept the fact that getting their degree won't necessarily mean they'll get the job they want, and getting a job probably won't mean they'll be able to live the comfortable life of their childhood.

What we have then is a new breed of student, readjusted to fit the times. Evidence of this came to light in my senior seminar. The professor wanted to determine what the class expected to be doing in five years. Every year he asks his students the same questions about future salaries, family plans and goals, and he records the results.

The professor said he was surprised that less than 50 percent of my class expected to be earning more money in five years than their parents did now, and that just a handful expected to own their own home within five years. He said that a few years ago almost everyone would have responded more optimistically to these questions. More interesting, though, was that 27 of 29 students said they expected to be happy even though they might not own a home or make much money.

"You'll be the luckiest because you will be happy living with less," the professor soothingly told us. "You were never lied to. You knew things were bad right from the start. You will be a well-adjusted group."

So it seems that many of my classmates believe that they will be content driving used cars and raising their families in cramped apartments.

But if they are at all like me, they will always dream of that big old colonial with a front porch, a new car and a little extra money for vacations.