“The days are long, but the years are short.” Upon recently hearing these words for the first time, I remain numb at their cruel veracity. I navigate my days in uncharted territory, mourning the imminent high school graduation of my middle son. These four years have been impossibly short. The tears spill unconsciously with every “last.” Desperate to impart wisdom, I borrow first from Beverly Sills’ 1981 commencement speech at Barnard College: “If you wonder when you’ll get time to rest, well, you can sleep in your old age if you live that long. You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.” My favorite is from Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution at the University of Miami in 1949: “It has sometimes been my idea that instead of a speaker offering sage advice, it would be a far better idea to place before a graduating audience a fine symphony…or a magnificent ballet, and when this had been completed, to say; ‘Ladies and gentlemen, life can be very lovely or very sad. It probably will be a mixture of both…Goodbye, and God go with you.”
Perhaps it’s because we sent him away as a freshman to a sealed campus as Culver struggled to administer a global student body amidst a global pandemic. There’s a special guilt reserved for parents who discharge their 14-year-old charge to boarding school thousands of miles from home during Covid. If nothing else, he’s not a Class of 2024 college graduate. A weekend Financial Times interview featured a finance undergraduate grappling with gaslighting. To protect his shot at landing a job, he asked his name not be revealed. “On one hand I’m going into a great workforce and on the other hand there are not a lot of jobs,” he said. “I do not know what to believe…it is a little worrisome.” His experience is not unique. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. U.S. employers will cut hiring of fresh graduates by 5.8% year-over-year, the steepest decline since the series’ 2015 inception. As for college grads aged 20-24, their unemployment rate rose to 5% from 4.2% in the last year.