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Her son is 24, graduate of a good college where he got good grades and behaved well–well, well enough so that nothing shows on his record. Even his Facebook account is 'clean." But finding a job since he's gotten out of school: tough going. He's in that cohort I wrote about in a previous post: From October 2010 through March 2011, 74.4 percent of college graduates under age 25 had jobs but only 45.9 percent of them had jobs that actually required a college degree.

His mom has been warned–by the hostility of his answers–not to ask him how the job hunting is going. But shes' worried. Not just about how long she's going to have to help  support him since a minimum wage job, on those occasions when he has landed one, would not pay the rent in even a group house. But the real concern is about the long-term implications: Will it put him in a lower salary bracket than he might have earned had he come out of college when jobs were available; will he lose his zest and enthusiasm for trying hard and let the lassitude of unsuccessful job hunting bring him down. 

Kevin Carey, an education writer and policy analyst, did some research that gives fresh perspective on that particular worry. Carey went back and looked at what happened to kids in 1982–young adults who struggled to find jobs in another difficult recession–and wrote about his findings in The New Republic.

Of the "sad cases" described in newspapers in 1982 [cases similar to my friend's son], he found the formerly under- or unemployed thriving. One of them, a Peace Corps alum with a master’s degree in international affairs,had been toiling away at a “mindless” file clerk job. He went on, Casey reports, "to a series of nonprofit management jobs and, by 2010, was a senior research project supervisor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Health." Another "sad case" is "a senior manager at an international development consulting company that works under contract with USAID. Her recent work includes building railroads in cyclone-devastated Madagascar."

They overcame. They suffered under the recession in which they came of age but they made up for it over time. There's nothing good about an economic downturn–and certainly nothing good about one as deep and prolonged as this one has been. So this is a note of hope to my friend who is struggling with the day to day pain of watching her talented and worthy son struggle and fail in a terrible job market. It will get better, and in his lifetime.