2010 College Graduates

Think back. In high school, did you give a shit about the economy? Did you go to college because you had your entire future planned out, and not because your parents threatened you with beatings if you just decided to work that job at Petsmart and get a small apartment? If you answered yes to either of those questions, you're a lying sack of crap, because you'd have known this shit was going to happen.

Okay, so to be fair, nobody knew this shit was going to happen. Except for everyone but you.

What you will be doing with your life for about 6 months.

How can you counteract this evil curse? How do you get the money you need to pay off those bloodsucking, life-killing student loans? You will simply need to get a bloodsucking, life-killing job instead. You make job hunting your job--go online, tear yourself away from Cracked (we know it's hard...but not completely! Just for a few hours a day), and apply to any and every job you can find, anywhere, at all.

You see, all colleges have a sinister claim that having a degree will help you get a better job, and an even more useless and false claim that their career center can actually help you find an actual job instead of just giving you a fucking personality test and telling you you should be a librarian because your unique and engaging person has been summed up into a bland four-letter description that really just stands for You're Fucking Screwed. Due to this, more and more high school grads are attending college. The result? Degree inflation.

You've been to college, yes? (If not, what the fuck are you doing in this topic? Laughing at us? Go ahead, get your two goddamn chuckles in.) So you know that you were forced to take core classes, like that useless College Algebra class that destroyed your GPA because you had to take it four times, even though you were a Lit major and the most math you should ever have to do is "price of book + coffee - member discount = $$".

The upshot of that is, now jobs don't give a fuck what you got your degree in. That sweet entry-level radio station job you had your eye set on, that you could totally get, because you majored in Communications? Now some jackass who majored in English is going to get that job instead of you. Why? Because as far as the job industry gives a shit, college taught all you kids the same skills. Thought you could get a job based on your superior Powerpoint skills? Tough luck, asshole, now the guy who made the presentation on "Why Transformers > Your Mom" in Speech class will get your job because he has a better job history and he, too, can list "Microsoft Office" on his resume.

Nowadays your Bachelor's degree is about as useful as a high school diploma was in the 70's, and what you really need is a graduate degree of some kind, which means several more years of slogging through classes and paying out thousands of dollars. Seeing a trend here? And they still wonder why there's been so many University shootings lately. Idiots.

So now you know the horrifying truth: college padding out their actually useful classes with expensive, utterly useless but fun-sounding ones is killing your chances of actually making a living, not unlike when your mom used to tell you that shoveling out the entire driveway after a 6-inch blizzard would help you Build Character, when it actually led to Excruciating Back Pain With Side of Hypothermia.

What can you do about it?

Well, you could attach yourself to a significant other with a job who will support you in exchange for sex and cleaning and doing the dishes until you can get some sort of menial labor job to wait out this damn recession. We have seen from the 1940's that this works...the only difference being that live-in moms in the 40's weren't dragging around the ball-and-chain of student loans from their time in school, just the ball-and-chain of a small child. And hey, only one of those two options can eventually grow up and start doing all your household chores for 50 cents a day while you sit back and sip Mai Tais to battle your lonely depression.

If you can't manage to do this (and let's face it...you probably can't, or you wouldn't spend all your time on Cracked instead of boning and being awesome), you probably have to resign yourself to living with your parents. If they give you shit, you can always point out that you went to college because of them, you have those damn loans because of them.

Alternatively--if it's not too late that is--you can major in (or change your major to) something that will actually be useful, provided you've planned out your future for once. We know it's hard, but...really...in exchange for graduating in 2010, and being unable to find a job to pay those threatening student loans, you could get an internship or a useful major, graduate in, say, 2011, and be able to pay off the extra thousands of dollars in student loans when they come around, after you've already got a job.

Think hard. Be wise. (And seriously...this is probably about the only Cracked article you'll ever read that will tell you to think hard and use wisdom, so listen up!)