acesfull86
Well-known member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/05/08/college-graduates-are-disappointed-casting-blame/
Disgruntled Starbucks workers embraced the United Auto Workers union, which they soon despised as too tepid about rectifying all injustices everywhere. Scheiber says the UAW now represents “roughly 100,000 higher-education workers” — graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty. Their numbers and grievances are growing faster than those of autoworkers.
Many Starbucks workers agitating for unionization were berating the company for an inadequate commitment to LGBTQ rights. Then, on Oct. 7, 2023, they fell in love with Hamas. One organizer wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with a portrait of Karl Marx. An Apple store employee, who blamed her declining mental health on “the job” and “the stress of unionizing,” became, Scheiber writes, so “desperate” she sold her two $150 tickets to a Beyoncé concert. An employee at a Baltimore-area Apple store: “I had to get rid of Hulu” (a video streaming service).
Blending labor activism with performance art, a Starbucks worker, who had a Western Michigan University degree in jewelry and metalsmithing, fashioned from chicken wire a Starbucks mermaid and a corporate lawyer. Scheiber says an employee “resisted Apple’s evaluation system because he believed performance-based bonuses” were inhumane. When Apple gave him stock, he sold it: “I don‘t believe in owning stock.”
These arrested-development adolescents are silly. There is, however, a serious problem. Even before artificial intelligence erases many more entry-level jobs, the market for expensively credentialed (often not highly educated) young adults is saturated. Unions, which represent only 6 percent of private-sector employees, are irrelevant to ameliorating this problem.
There is a growing subset of graduates who, propelled by the applause of grade inflation, emerge from the political monoculture of campuses with high grades, low learning and a talent for blaming. They blame capitalism, markets, society, something for their frustrations and disappointments. Their vast sense of entitlement includes an assumed exemption from common life experiences.
Many supposedly underemployed graduates are casualties of the siren call of “college for all.” This gave the political class something more to subsidize, and gave the academic industry opportunities to raise tuition, siphoning up the subsidies to fund expansions. Thus were millions of young people lured onto an expensive — in time and money — path away from well-paid and satisfying trades, and into a curdled adulthood nursing vague grievances about foregone status.
Disgruntled Starbucks workers embraced the United Auto Workers union, which they soon despised as too tepid about rectifying all injustices everywhere. Scheiber says the UAW now represents “roughly 100,000 higher-education workers” — graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty. Their numbers and grievances are growing faster than those of autoworkers.
Many Starbucks workers agitating for unionization were berating the company for an inadequate commitment to LGBTQ rights. Then, on Oct. 7, 2023, they fell in love with Hamas. One organizer wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with a portrait of Karl Marx. An Apple store employee, who blamed her declining mental health on “the job” and “the stress of unionizing,” became, Scheiber writes, so “desperate” she sold her two $150 tickets to a Beyoncé concert. An employee at a Baltimore-area Apple store: “I had to get rid of Hulu” (a video streaming service).
Blending labor activism with performance art, a Starbucks worker, who had a Western Michigan University degree in jewelry and metalsmithing, fashioned from chicken wire a Starbucks mermaid and a corporate lawyer. Scheiber says an employee “resisted Apple’s evaluation system because he believed performance-based bonuses” were inhumane. When Apple gave him stock, he sold it: “I don‘t believe in owning stock.”
These arrested-development adolescents are silly. There is, however, a serious problem. Even before artificial intelligence erases many more entry-level jobs, the market for expensively credentialed (often not highly educated) young adults is saturated. Unions, which represent only 6 percent of private-sector employees, are irrelevant to ameliorating this problem.
There is a growing subset of graduates who, propelled by the applause of grade inflation, emerge from the political monoculture of campuses with high grades, low learning and a talent for blaming. They blame capitalism, markets, society, something for their frustrations and disappointments. Their vast sense of entitlement includes an assumed exemption from common life experiences.
Many supposedly underemployed graduates are casualties of the siren call of “college for all.” This gave the political class something more to subsidize, and gave the academic industry opportunities to raise tuition, siphoning up the subsidies to fund expansions. Thus were millions of young people lured onto an expensive — in time and money — path away from well-paid and satisfying trades, and into a curdled adulthood nursing vague grievances about foregone status.
