I won't stick myself in the middle of any "political debates", but I will say something about unemployment. I totally agree that there are a lack of good jobs, to an extent. I will also agree that people who are unemployed could SOMETIMES look a little harder for work than they do. However, my generation grew up our whole lives with our parents and their friends, our grandparents and their friends, people you'd never even met before, everyone, telling us that we had to go to college so we wouldn't have to work "flipping burgers" or doing the hard manual labor jobs they did. First, college isn't for everyone; it's just not. Second, that philosophy and way of thinking is putting a negative connotation on manual labor, and that's a horrible thing to do; I personally have a lot of respect for people who do actual hard work everyday. Just to be clear, I'm not one of them. Now, all that to say this: when I see or hear someone my age that kind find a job and then hear someone older suggest that "McDonald's is always hiring", I'm really conflicted.
Part of me wants to agree that a crappy job that pays less than you want is better than not having a job and making nothing. On the other hand, I want to explain that the person you just suggested that to spent their entire life growing up with people telling them spend four - or more - extra years in school so they wouldn't have to take that kind of job, and now it's being flipped back around on them!
Also, with this trend of pushing everyone who has any opportunity at all to go to college to attend, there has, obviously, been an increase in the number of people qualified for a certain jobs. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there has been large increase in the number of people enrolling in college, 21 million in 2010 up from 10.6 million between 1983 and 1985. That means there are more people qualified for higher paying jobs than there were thirty years ago. Yes, there are more jobs than there were then - I would imagine, albeit I didn't look up any statistics on that, I'm just ceding the devil's advocate point before it's even presented; however, are those jobs the ones for which we all went in debt and spent all those extra years in a classroom? I don't think they are. The competition for those jobs is much higher now than it has been in the past.
I got curious and decided to look up some specifics on a particular field, and the medical field is one that is popular locally. For example, the Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee was established as a way of trying to advise the nation on how many doctors we actually need in the US numbers were growing so fast. In 1980, there were right at 460,000 physicians in the US. There were more than 780,000 twenty years later in 2000. That's big increase in a number of qualified applicants for a position. NOW, on the other side of the argument, GMENAC actually found that it wasn't a saturation of the field, but that we might actually be facing a shortage, having only 276 physicians per 1,000 citizens.
My point is still proven that the number of people attending school and being educated for “better” jobs has grown significantly - not just in the medical field, others as well - making it much more competitive to find a "good" job. So, the next you think about telling the recent college graduate or twenty-something that they're lazy or should just go "flip some burgers" if he can't find anything else, remember that he or she was probably, well, brainwashed is a good word for it, to believe they shouldn't have to take those demeaning jobs.
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