To the Class of
2012
By BRET STEPHENS
Dear Class of
2012,
Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate
you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic,
most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless
subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy
economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such
enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a
job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on
your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address
unknown.
No doubt some of
you have overcome real hardships or taken real degrees. A couple of years ago I
hired a summer intern from West Point. She
came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises in which she kept a
bulletproof vest on at all times, even while sleeping. She writes brilliantly
and is as self-effacing as she is accomplished. Now she's in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.
If you're like
that intern, please feel free to feel sorry for yourself. Just remember she doesn't.
Unfortunately, dear graduates, chances are
you're nothing like her. And since you're no longer children, at least
officially, it's time someone tells you the facts of life. The other facts.
Fact One is that,
in our "knowledge-based"
economy, knowledge counts. Yet here you are, probably the least knowledgeable
graduating class in history.
A few months ago,
I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League
university and aspirations to write about Middle East
politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely
familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he
didn't know who succeeded that
president.
Pop quiz, Class of
'12: Do you?
Many of you have
been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your
head with facts but to teach you how
to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top
schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank
spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ.
It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are
in the first place.
Now to Fact Two: Your competition is global.
Shape up. Don't end your days like a man I met a few weeks ago in Florida, complaining that Richard Nixon had caused his New York City business to fail by opening up China.
In places like Ireland, France,
India and Spain, your most talented and ambitious peers
are graduating into economies even more depressed than America's.
Unlike you, they probably speak several languages. They may also have a degree
in a hard science or
engineering—skills that transfer easily to the more remunerative jobs in
investment banks or global consultancies.
I know a lot of
people like this from my
neighborhood in New York City, and it's a good thing they're so
well-mannered because otherwise they'd be eating our lunch. But if things
continue as they are, they might soon be eating yours.
Which reminds me
of Fact Three: Your prospective employers can smell BS from miles away. And
most of you don't even know how badly you stink.
When did puffery
become the American way? Probably around the time Norman Mailer came out with
"Advertisements for Myself." But at least that was in the service of
provoking an establishment that liked to cultivate an ideal of emotional
restraint and public reserve.
To read through your CVs, dear graduates, is to
be assaulted by endless Advertisements for Myself. Here you are, 21 or 22 years
old, claiming to have accomplished feats in past summer internships or at your
school newspaper that would be hard to credit in a biography of Walter Lippmann
or Ernie Pyle.
If you're not too
bright, you may think this kind of nonsense goes undetected; if you're a little
brighter, you probably figure everyone does it so you must as well.
But the best of
you don't do this kind of thing at all. You have an innate sense of modesty.
You're confident that your résumé needs no embellishment. You understand that
less is more.
In other words,
you're probably capable of thinking for yourself. And here's Fact Four: There
will always be a market for people who can do that.
In every
generation there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else.
But your generation has an especially bad case, because your mass conformism is
masked by the appearance of mass nonconformism. It's a point I learned from my West Point intern, when I asked her what it was like to
lead such a uniformed existence.
Her answer stayed
with me. Wearing a uniform, she said, helped her figure out what it was that
really distinguished her as an individual.
Now she's a second
lieutenant, leading a life of meaning and honor, figuring out how to Think
Different for the sake of a cause that counts. Not many of you will be able to
follow in her precise footsteps, nor do you need to do so. But if you can just
manage to tone down your egos, shape up your minds, and think unfashionable
thoughts, you just might be able to do something worthy with your lives. And
even get a job. Good luck!
