EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN — A thorough new report finds that college students on the cusp of adulthood are anxious about their job prospects, homeownership, and the direction of the country, and the adults who commissioned the report are acting like this is brand-new information, which is the single most American thing about it.

The Associated Press spent time with students at Michigan State and elsewhere and found despair fueling restlessness with the political system — a distrust of both parties, a hunger for “big stuff,” and the sense, held by nearly every person who has ever been twenty-two, that the economy was arranged before they arrived and without their input.

Every generation of Americans has felt exactly this. The difference is that our generation finally hired researchers to confirm it, and the researchers, to their credit, charged for the confirmation. This is how democracy works: the young people know things, the older people fund a study to find out what the young people know, and the study, when it arrives, is described on the evening news as a startling development.

Consider the history. In 1971, students despaired about inflation and the draft. In 1981, they despaired about inflation and nuclear war. In 2009, they despaired about a financial crisis they were told, correctly, they had not caused. Today’s students despair about housing, jobs, and a political system they describe, in the report’s own words, as no longer interested in helping them. Same despair. Better fonts.

"Adults discovered this year that young people are worried. Adults should be proud of this discovery. It took one generation of tuition prices and one generation of housing prices, and now the people who set both of those prices are writing op-eds about the feelings of the people who inherited them. That's engagement, and engagement is the point." — Carla Jimenez, on the record, because the report quoted everyone else

A SHORT HISTORY OF YOUTHFUL DESPAIR

  • 1971: Students anxious. Adults: "They'll grow out of it." Students did not grow out of it; they grew into mortgages.
  • 1981: Students anxious about the end of the world. Adults: also anxious, but owning homes.
  • 2009: Students anxious about a crash. Adults: "Young people today!" — a phrase that has appeared in every single one of these stories.
  • 2026: Students anxious. Adults: "Study finds young people anxious." The cycle completes, as it always does, with a press release.

The report’s most quoted line comes from a student who said people are “desperate for big stuff.” Some columnists called this radical. It isn’t. It is the same sentence every American has said while watching a smaller politician explain a smaller plan. The students are not rejecting the system. They are reading the same report the rest of us have been holding for years, and they are the only ones still honest enough to say the findings out loud.

At press time, a bipartisan panel of experts announced it would study the students’ despair and report back within eighteen months, a timeline the students described, accurately, as “exactly the problem, but slower.”