Our generation’s duty

As students at a public university, we know we’re God’s greatest gift to humanity. But we can’t help it. With this much swag flowing through our veins, it may as well be our birthright to act like drunken moose.

Unfortunately, we also have to do scholarly things like read bolded words, join clubs to meet chicks and get internships to practice our abilities making copies. After all, this is the modern college experience; it isn’t your parents’ college experience. 

It’s hard to imagine that an old college graduate could ever give a “back in my day we had it tougher” speech when it comes to getting a job out of college. I mean, back then, people went to school just to learn and résumés weren’t a biggie either — but things done changed.

The current requirements to appear to be a qualified job candidate, which go above and beyond academia, prove to me that past generations have it out for us. I’m inclined to believe that the people responsible for such hurdles are the same jealous people who didn’t get invited to the cool parties.

Of course, the old people will try to put a spin on it as if they are helping us. They’ll tell you things like, “Someone’s got to pay this country’s debt.” The oldies seem to forget we have our own mountain of debt to burn.

Student debt in the United States has reached $830 billion, and tuition will probably keep climbing higher, too. Sorry, ladies, I know you’re a hit at Two-Dollar Tuesdays, but there’s no such thing as a free drink when we pay $40k to party ... I mean learn.

But I’m not here to just point the finger without offering a solution. That’s not how I roll. Clearly the bar has been set high for current college students, so it’s obvious the only reasonable thing to do is push it even further. We’ll do what the generations before us have done: create more distractions and throw more academic requirements at our youth.

Give every newborn baby a new iPhone, or whatever new gizmo is dominating handheld devices. And yes, babies will need phones. I’m projecting that the future job market will be tough for babies who aren’t fluent at six months old. You just can’t fall behind the competition these days. But enough about babies, let’s talk more about real people.

Students probably won’t be able to meet our demands while maintaining optimal party levels. Don’t worry, I’m sure a new study drug will be popular amongst schools of higher education by that time and we can read about it in the papers just like parents do today.

We can criticize the college lifestyle we created for our children and then get sloppy with them and their friends at IU tailgates. I’m also projecting the tailgate will still be the best thing about IU football.

When the new generations complain, we’ll tell them about how, in our day, tweets were limited to 140 characters and our grandparents didn’t have HDTV.

That should keep them humble.

­— agreiner@indiana.edu