Originally posted on futuremajority.org on November 7, 2011
by Sarah Burris 

This blog is part of the Demos/Young Invincibles blog carnival to bring awareness to the economic impact on young Americans.

DEMOS released an important study today “The State of Young America,” that tells us that half of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 believe that a fundamental tenet of the American Dream is broken. We’re seeing this frustration manifest itself across the country with the Occupy Wall Street protests.

A recent article in Business Week remarks that Occupy Wall Street protests are filled with signs about a crushing student debt load. In a widely repeated USA Today report, the total amount of outstanding student loans will reach $1 trillion this year. It isn’t hard to see why so many in our generation might believe the American Dream is no longer attainable.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a clear correlation between high unemployment and education. Those who don’t graduate from high school have a greater likelihood of being unemployed than those who graduate from college. The assumption is that, if you want to get a job, you must go to college. But to go to college, all but the wealthiest students have to take out loans. To make matters worse there’s a widening gap in the hours worked vs. hours paid.

So what do our lives look like? We’ve got to go to school to get a good job but the cost is so high we have to take out loans to pay for it, and the wages are too low to survive and pay back the loans even though we have to work twice as hard.

President Obama recently announced a kind of “student bailout” that will provide forgiveness for loans, provided students work in some form of public service job following graduation. This solution is an important step in acknowledging that education is necessary in today’s world of job seeking, but that the costs are out of whack with affordability.

Unfortunately, this is merely a band-aid on the gash that is our economic problems. Our problems persist while our government continues to give tax cuts to the wealthy. Something is broken with the priorities of our policy makers and our business community. How can we succeed as a country when the wealthiest Americans control a policy agenda hellbent on benefiting their bottom lines and not ours?

This is what the death of the American Dream looks like, and those of us who are occupying cities across the country are the idealists who refuse to let it die. As we look forward we must consider that we’re a different country than we were 50 years ago, and the solutions that worked then won’t necessarily work now. A student bailout is a great quick fix, but we must look for long term solutions to fix the system that is now working against those who just want a shot at making a decent life.