Altered Paths: The story of life after Princeton

Goldfarb tells the story of Princeton alumni who have been — temporarily, we assume — knocked off the ladder of success or at least consigned to its lower rungs by the Great Recession of 2008-and-counting, never mind what economists say about the recession ending; for job seekers, it’s still a near-Depression.

There’s David Czapka ’07 who had his sights set on a “career in academics.” But the recession changed all that. He had to move back to his home in Wayne, N.J. and wound up applying for a “low-wage job at a nearby Barnes & Noble.” Said Czapka, “I had not worked at a $7-an-hour job since I was 16 years old ... I felt pretty lost.”

Goldfarb tells of other recent graduates traveling down “altered paths,” while recognizing that the typical alumnus still makes out pretty darn well, at least compared to his or her counterparts from other colleges.

Still, the data is discouraging and suggests that unless the great jobs machine that used to be the American economy gets revved up again soon — as it surely won’t if any of the Republican candidates are elected to the White House or if Republicans are returned to a majority in Congress — many more superbly educated Tigers like Czapka may find themselves detoured, if not derailed, stacking books, waiting tables or just “feeling lost.”

Goldfarb quotes statistics showing the impacts on job-seeking recent college grads, and they’re not pretty. “Barely more than half — 56 percent — of those who graduated in 2010 had held at least one job ... 14 percent were or are unemployed or working part time and looking for full-time work,” according to a national survey conducted by Rutgers’ Center for Workforce Development.

Taking an especially big hit is the financial sector, a.k.a. Wall Street, the sure pathway to a lifetime in the 1 percent. In 2007, 180 Princeton grads had landed in investment banking by July of that year, barely time to find an apartment in Manhattan before starting work processing those mysterious “financial instruments” that landed us in such a mess. By 2009, that number had dropped by more than half.

Welcome, Tigers, to the 99 percent. And that’s not a bad thing. Or at least it needn’t be. Learning how “the other half lives” — as we used to say — can be a vital part of a continuing education process that may seem ever so far from the ivory tower. Call it the graduate school of hard knocks.

Goldfarb reports on some Princeton alumni who were forced into life-changing jobs that have made them better — and even happier — people for the experience.

Consider Jason Harper ’09, who “like many of his peers, felt the allure of Wall Street,” only to see his six-figure job prospects evaporate. Harper was forced to take the “harder creative path,” as he put it. So he followed his passion, film-making, and, according to Goldfarb, “now runs his own video production company in Brooklyn” after some downtime living with his grandparents and spending his days sending out resumes that nobody answered.

But these stories of follow-your-dreams serendipity, as encouraging as they may be in a difficult time, are really not the main point of this essay. My simple message is this: Take that minimum-wage job, be glad of it and learn vital lessons from it that can’t be had in any classroom.

In 2001, after journalist Barbara Ehrenreich took a series of minimum-wage jobs for a year, she wrote an eye-opening book, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” that showed there’s really no such thing as an unskilled job, whether it’s waiting tables in Florida or cleaning houses in Maine. There’s also no such thing as a real “safety net” for the working poor, most of the people who bring you food or take away your trash.

Survival on a minimum wage is a full-time job. Give it a try for a while and find out. Then when it comes time to pick a candidate for higher office — or, better yet, run for office yourself — you won’t be among those who want to balance the budget on the stooped backs of the working poor.

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R. William Potter ’68 is a partner at the Potter & Dickson law firm and a frequent preceptor in law-related courses at the University. He can be reached at potterrex@cs.com.