‘Dispatches from the Debtcade After College’ (Good Name)

Kevin Nguyen of The Bygone Bureau has edited a collection of essays called The Graduates: Dispatches from the Debtcade After College.

I fired off a very short series of questions; he wrote back with very thoughtful answers.

LS: Tell me about putting together this book! Do you have debt? Do you feel like there’s a sharp divide between people who do and don’t and their experience of life after college? Are we all just fucked?

KG: I basically got tired of reading about how fucked we are. When I graduated in 2009, it seemed like every other week, there was a trend piece about how college graduates weren’t finding jobs or moving back home. I kept thinking, “This is the worst time to graduate!” But really, there is never a *good* time to graduate. Recession or not, having to find a job and pay back your debt and becoming a grown-up is a scary thing. But being scared is actually a very normal, healthy way to feel.

We decided to put *The Graduates* together to capture a breadth of post-college experiences. And actually, it was fairly easy to find a lot of different people doing a lot of different things — getting good jobs, getting bad jobs, joining non-profits, going to grad school, starting businesses, having babies, pursuing the arts, and so on.

I’m not sure if there’s a divide between people who do and don’t have college debt because I just assume everybody has some form of it. But there is a difference between the people who let their debt overwhelm them and the people who don’t. The upside of debt is that it forces you to think further ahead and work harder than you might’ve otherwise. (In both a macro- and micro-sense, it’s weird how borrowing money is both the thing that enables and cripples us!)

So we aren’t all fucked, but the terror that we might be is the strongest motivator we have.

Read an excerpt here, buy it here.

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