With graduation season quickly approaching, the American college system, composed of thousands of students, is gearing up to release most of its students out into the so-called real world, with the expectation that they will, somewhat magically, become productive members of society. This is, after all, what these students have been preparing themselves for. When they signed up for college, it would be absurd to think that these students wouldn’t have attractive prospects after accruing possibly tens of thousands of dollars of debt for a paper that purportedly promises financial stability for the rest of their lives.

As of December 2025, 5.6% of recent college graduates (that is, roughly one-in-eighteen students) are unemployed. While still at one-third the peak recent graduate unemployment rate in June 2020, this data is only expected to rise following the release of the newest batch of graduates. Additionally, the college graduates who do find jobs are, in general, not looking forward to a successful start to their careers. 42.5% of recent college graduates are slated to be underemployed, and it is not impossible to assume that, much like the unemployment rate that is steadily rising, the rate of underemployment is only going to go up as well. Anecdotally, the things you hear on campus about the job application cycle are bad enough to be outright spine-chilling. Of the interdisciplinary group of friends I have, all of them have had to apply to hundreds of jobs over the past six months to try to secure a job following graduation. Those who didn’t and instead applied for graduate school or professional programs such as law school and medical school have found that the application cycle—which for years worsened due to an increase in grade inflation, resume padding and the normalization of undergraduate students doing undergraduate (and often underpaid) research—was one of the toughest ones in decades.

Current circumstances only further exacerbate the depressing state of post-graduate prospects. Due to President Donald Trump’s administration’s short-sighted and catastrophic orders related to research funding and the reduction in federally granted graduate loans, graduate school admissions are expected to lower significantly, while those who do get in have a lower chance of receiving funding or aid for their studies. Those who had planned their lives around going into research and academia following graduation, after entering college solidly in the middle of the Biden administration, have found that the life they wanted to achieve had, through the work of regressive, anti-intellectual and heartless policies, been pulled away from them. Whenever a student enters college, they do so with the earnest belief that this will be how they gain financial stability and a chance at a better life. For those who are less interested in academia as a whole, colleges work through a sort of social contract, where you give almost all your time and certainly a decent chunk of your money to invest in your future. This is why one of the few ways to discharge your student loan debt is to prove an institution has lied about their placement rates following graduation. But this social contract is breaking at the seams and students are only getting more and more disillusioned, with no careers, no further education and no future.

The state of the U.S. does not seem to help matters for the lack of shining optimism, though. While Millennials had to endure the worst of the 2008 recession and were the canary in the coal mine for the increasing unaffordability that characterizes the 2010s and 2020s, Gen Z has never once been in a breathable mine, so to speak. Since 1997, the first year of Gen Z, the median house cost has increased 270%, the average college costs per semester have tripled and the monthly health insurance costs have more than tripled. But this does not mean that Gen Z people have been earning triple the salary to keep up with inflation, never mind experiencing economic growth. In 1997, the median American salary was around $37,005. By the end of 2024, the median salary was $61,984, meaning that the costs have increased 300%, but the pay has barely grown 167.5%. That is nothing when you consider that the average salary in 1997 was reflective of that aforementioned college promise: those with Bachelor’s degrees earned, on average, $53,134. That average, in December 2025, only increased to $60,000.

Of course, the hopeless outlook is not solely informed by the increasingly dire economy. In most other aspects, the U.S. shows a marked decay, as well. Discourse has become tainted by the manosphere and incel rhetoric to the point that I had to learn what a “looksmaxxer” was and how “framemogging” is apparently a thing. 2000s-era homophobia has become normalized and a violent backlash against transgender people has led to widespread book bans all across the U.S. to such an extent that, in my home state of Florida, some counties forbid having novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved in schools.

Speaking of the 2000s, society is gearing up for a return to heroin chic, precipitated by the widespread usage of GLP-1s, which are relatively untested in long-term effects, but this does not matter as long as everyone suddenly becomes stick-thin. Racism and xenophobia run rampant through the political sphere, with about a third of Americans believing that all illegal immigrants should be detained and deported. Another 22% believe that they should be deported if they arrived in the last four years. And, if you oppose, the paraliminatory, xenophobic ICE has, according to the vice-president, all the right in the world to shoot you down while you’re peacefully protesting, stopping a deportation or even driving in your car. War is widespread, bloody and unfair, and it is hard to forget that instead of doing anything for the betterment of humanity, a good portion of the tax dollars we pay go to bomb little kids in Gaza and nice grandmothers in Lebanon, while the President threatens to erase an entire civilization because his fee-fees got hurt. While the U.S. already had a history of genocide, those in power have chosen to partake in two at the same time, with no regard for human lives or any aspect of morality that is not about lining their pockets with dollar bills that will never reach the masses. Each of the bombs that drop heats up the planet just a bit more, and as seen with the past few months, we are never going to experience a proper spring ever again.

This is the world that the class of 2026 is being released into. I do not have a conclusion, because I do not know if there’s anything positive to conclude with, except that we saw the far side of the moon, and it was beautiful.