[potatolicious]

Not to mention young recently graduated lawyers and doctors make shit for money, and newly minted lawyers in particular are facing much weaker than expected demand in the market.

"Making smart choices" doesn't always pan out. I don't think one can easily accuse someone who studied hard, disciplined themselves, and made their way through law school of being shortsighted, but here they are facing unemployment or dramatic underemployment.

Ditto traditional fields of engineering. Lots of people who studied hard, planned ahead, worked hard, and then fell into the massive collapse of manufacturing in this country.

It's nice to know that the crazy "improv political theater" from that one guy has some bearing in reality, though.

[will_work4tears]

As a case in point, my sister and her husband recently finished their post-doc work at NYU and are heading out to SF. Both of them PhDs, both of them work very hard at what they do, both of them in school/fellowships/postdocs since graduating high school (they are 32/33 now) and are having trouble finding jobs. Her husband recently took a job in SF doing research getting paid a mere 60k a year. That's very low anywhere for the effort put into it, insultingly low in SF, IMO. She can probably find work there in SF pretty easy, but probably not making much more.

Lazy they are not.

(seriously thinking of pushing them into joining one of those RoR or similar bootcamps and getting into Programming, they have the drive and intellect to do well, I think)

Edit: Just to be clear, their PhDs are both in the 'Hard Sciences' - biology to be specific - Virology and Genetics respectively.