The "American dream" is basically the idea of open-ended opportunity, that is, that one can overcome barriers through hard work and resourcefulness to rise to financial success.

The generations of immigrants who came to America throughout the 1800s and early 1900s in particular did not expect to start at the top or to have some predefined path to success. They shined shoes, washed dishes, waited tables, worked on railroads, did whatever scut work was available, and stored up what little they got so that one day they might afford a home and be able to put their kids through college. That was not a universal experience, but it was a common one. Nothing glamorous about it. Yet, through hardship and sacrifice, they could advance - eventually escaping from the poverty that had marked their lives and those of so many of their compatriots back home. I experienced this first-hand in a family of Greek immigrants and we, as the kids in such a family, were never indulged but were expected as well to get delivery jobs, restaurant jobs, whatever, in order to help pay our way through school. We were all told to set our goals high but never to think of ourselves as being too good for the work we had to along the way, whatever it might be and however hard or unappealing it might be. That is how character is shaped to prepare you for the greater challenges ahead.

And so all I can say about your comment is "spot on." Thanks.

This is an entirely different country from what it was in the 19th century. Although early industrial America was brutal in a lot of ways that our society isn't, it was possible to "work your way up" then. Now it's not. The work environment in 1900 had a one-tier society-- with extreme inequality and brutality within that tier, but it was still only one tier. Line workers could become foremen who could become managers who could become executives. Now we have multiple tiers and it's nearly impossible to jump from one to another. The people who are running large companies today never worked "regular jobs"-- except during high school and college, maybe, where it doesn't count because career and lifestyle are not on the line-- they went into business school and, although they became "only" middle managers after that, they started on the inside track.

You got any evidence to support that?

My family does the exact same thing, except a bit faster. My sister already went to college. My relatives are business owners of nail shops. Granted it's a only a single anecdotal point.

Beside, startups founders plunge automatically to "poverty" level just so they can start their own business and then rise to millionaire status or more if they's successful.

Startup founders do not go into poverty.

To do a startup, you have to be middle-class, at least, from the start, because otherwise you have no hope of getting the funding or building up the savings.

The most successful startups are an exception to the fact of American society being tiered, but these types of sociological statements always admit exceptions. If you want to see our tiered society in action, note how difficult it is to get venture capital and press coverage if you're not from an upper-class background, and compare it to how easily rich kids are able to get these resources.

You don't understand how press coverage works. Being upper-class has nothing to do with it, unless you are princess diana. You just pay people to do your PR. They get the story into the press for you. The PR people themselves are NEVER from upper-class backgrounds... it's a pretty ghetto occupation to get into in the first place. In fact they are usually from such limited backgrounds in the first place that half of them will do the work for almost nothing. (but it's the ones who charge a lot who you really want to hire)

You know nothing about the upper class. They don't need to hire PR firms (which is very expensive and unaffordable to a bootstrapped startup). They have their well-connected daddies and uncles make phone calls to get press coverage, etc.

Spot on.

If the NY Times want to write a story about an elusive American Dream they should write about us, the Dream Act students, who've been stuck in limbo with no job and no rights in sight because of our broken immigration system.

It feels absolutely devastating to graduate from college, hang that degree on the wall, and realize that you can't even open a bank account.

Plenty of illegal immigrants have bank accounts. At least around here (Bay Area) it's kind of a joke -- there's literally a separate line for illegal immigrants to do all-cash transactions. Presumably they use a fake SSN to open the account.

Also, there is nothing preventing illegal immigrants from going to college. It's unfair, however, for tax payers to subsidize their education even further when an American citizen who happens to be from another state must pay full tuition.

You are either misinformed or are purposely changing the facts.

The immigrants who open bank accounts open them using ITIN. Others, can't open a bank account because we lack _any_ documentation that is not expired. Our consulates are refusing to renew anything. Others, yet again, are stateless individuals and don't have a consulate period. Dream Act students often fall into these categories because they were brought here at a very young age.

There is plenty preventing immigrants from going to college. Tax payers are not subsidizing anything, because undocumented students cannot apply for any federal loans or financial aid. If you are undocumented and go to college, you pay out of pocket, period. There are only a handful of private merit based scholarship that are available to undocumented students. I'm one of the lucky ones.

Out of state tuition argument is moot and I'm tired of the misinformation around the issue. There are only 10 states that have legislation that allows undocumented students to be eligible for in-state tuition BUT ONLY IF YOU HAVE BEEN A RESIDENT OF THE STATE FOR AT LEAST 5 YEARS AND GRADUATED FROM A STATE HIGH SCHOOL. I've lived in New York State for over ten years, and my parents have payed taxes into the states treasury every single year. I am a New Yorker and the in-state tuition law recognizes that for purposes of tuition. So "Americans have to pay out of state tuition while undocumented immigrants can pay in-state tuition." is complete bull shit. Residents of the state pay in-state, out of state students pay out of state, undocumented or not. Fair and square, and available only 10 states.

You simply don't want to recognize that I am an American and a human being. If you see this issue for what it is, our fight for basic human rights, the economics of it all of a sudden don't feel that important. I am _American_, educated, and an aspiring entrepreneur. One day I just want to wake up and be able to breathe.

I'm not changing any facts.

!. Illegal immigrants have bank accounts. I don't know specifically how they do it, which is why I said "presumably"... I just know that they do.

2. There is nothing, legally, preventing illegal immigrants from going to college. Yes, cost might be an issue, but to say that it is the US government's responsibility to make sure that a Mexican citizen, for instance, can go to college in the US is absurd.

3. I don't think you know what "moot"means.

4. In-state tuition is, by definition, a subsidy.

5. To say that "Americans have to pay out of state tuition while undocumented immigrants can pay in-state tuition" isn't bullshit... it's a fact by your own admission.

6. I recognize that illegal immigrants are human beings and that some are "Americans" culturally, philosophically etc. whatever that means. On the other hand, I don't think American citizenship is a "basic human right."

To be fair, hunting a job while in another job is much trickier. It actually takes quite some time to write applications and so on (that's how I remember it anyway). Not saying it is impossible, but I can imagine that "just take any job" could be counter productive.

4-5 job applications per week you could manage while actually in full time work tho'...

Also, though a lot of people won't admit to it, he's putting himself in danger by taking a mediocre job. He can very easily be typecast into that sort of role for a long time.

Is it a bigger danger to work in a mediocre job than to have a two year span of unemployment on his resume?

I'd say yes - I was pigeonholed as a Java Developer for 10 years...

Oh come on. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps if you don't like that. Find a hot new language and play with it in your spare time. Start an open source project with it. Contribute to the community. Then apply to jobs with that knowledge and skill set on your resume, and you'll break out of that role. Just have to want it.

Agreed, I worked in .Net and Java for a few years, decided I wanted to get back to PHP, started up an open source project, started talking about it and mastering the language in my free time. Now I work a PHP job that I love and I like to think having a couple thousand lines of example code out in the wild gave me an edge.

I don't know, but I think both are bad. If I were him, I'd probably bump the college degree by a couple years.

Yeah they could have picked a more sympathetic subject.

I recall another story about a girl who attended NYU and has a mountain of debt and can't find work.

At the end of the article it stated her major, and it wasn't something that was marketable in today's economy.

Which sounds slightly arrogant. As a reader, I can see the mistakes made. The reality in any economy is that a womens studies graduate from NYU is going to have more difficulty finding work than say an engineering graduate from a state university.

If the goals for employment are self-actualization, then be prepared for a hunt in the beginning. If the goals are to earn a paycheck - any paycheck, then there is plenty of work out there.

I am afraid that a lot of people in my generation have a very strong sense of entitlement.

I think there is much more pressure on young people today (me being one of them) that you must be doing what your love or working on your passion.

While good advice, some young people don't realise that this is good long-term advice. It's something you should work towards over a number of years. It is a very big mistake to close doors that may not offer the perfect path. I have some friends like this who seem to want the perfect job right away so they pass up other opportunities even though they could lead to it in the future.

There is also a lot more pressure on young people today to go amass piles of debt acquiring a college degree that they do not need.

The stigma against trade and vocational educations in this country needs to die, otherwise we're going to just keep starting people off at a bigger disadvantage than they need be for very little good reason.

I agree -- and going one step further, WITHIN higher education, there seems to be somewhat of a stigma against training for real-world, hands-on, applications. I was pretty lucky to attend a college that encouraged students to work on projects that could become viable products... but from what I hear from friends, it was the exception.

Just to provide another data point from my own college experience, I actually ended up dropping out from my school because I got fed up with the fact that their program focused too much on application.

This is a school whose computer science curriculum circa 2004 still included COBOL because one of the major employers in my area is the banking industry. (Coincidentally, the CS building carries the name of one of the big names in that field here).

CS is a field where the theory end of things are often the most important thing you could take away long term, so having that kind of focus on tools in general (let alone ones that are hopeless obsolete for most purposes) is just insane.

Like everything else in life, it's all about balance. That said, I can't blame academia too much for erring on the side of theory.

I agree with what you're saying -- I thoroughly enjoyed the pure theory classes as part of the CS curriculum. I also agree that it is more important to teach concepts than specific technologies. That said, I think there are schools that fail to teach concepts as well... things like working as part of a team, using source control and designing a product modularly and writing code which would be considered "production quality." There's a tendency to put those things off because it is "just for a school project."

Exactly, long-term is the key. The majority of us are not going to be instantly wealthy (in the sense of money or passion).

"I think there is much more pressure on young people today (me being one of them) that you must be doing what your love or working on your passion."

That does work, but the key is that you just start doing what you love, possibly in your free time (chances are that when you start out, you're not good enough yet to get paid for it :-). If you keep that up long enough, and you keep enjoying it, chances are that at some point you will be good enough to get a job doing it. Case in point...

What does NOT work is sitting around waiting for a job to come by that you might like (like the guy in the article seems to be doing). Nor is it a good idea to live off of someone else while you wait.

The entitled douche bags may be in the spotlight, but our generation is perfectly prepared. We me be overlooked, but I say without hesitation that no generation has had such a wealth of opportunity before it and the means to make it real. 6 years out of college and the world has yet to blunt my view of the possible.

Another choice quote. "Many hard-pressed millennials are falling back on their parents, as Scott Nicholson has. While he has no college debt (his grandparents paid all his tuition and board) many others do, and that helps force them back home."

I hope that NY Times readers do not just assume that Scott is typical of other members of my generation. Just about everyone I know has some form of student debt and are already starting behind the eight-ball. Scott apparently doesn't understand how fortunate he really is.

"Two-thirds (65.6%) of 4-year undergraduate students graduated with a Bachelor's degree and some debt in 2007-08, and the average student loan debt among graduating seniors was $23,186" -- http://www.finaid.org/loans

Or at least a more typical subject. The very fact that this person has a college education with no debt puts him at a steep advantage compared to most Americans his age.

Another way to read this article is that someone with this kind of advantage is still unable to attain their definition of success, therefore people that do not have this advantage are even worse off. Meaning, that this person needs to either become an adult and take any job he can get while redefining their definition or stop complaining.

Not that I agree with that point, there are plenty of people without this advantage that are very successful, but I suspect that this article is meant to be comforting to the many other privileged readers of the NY times.

He's working odd jobs and as a volunteer firefighter, so he is doing useful work. He's also sending out five resumes per week, which is a lot if he's actually researching the jobs and positions. (I know some people send out 200 per day, but let's not encourage resume spam.) It's not like he's playing video games 14 hours per day. So yes, he is sympathetic.

He's being selective about the work he'll take, but maybe he should be. Put yourself in the employer's perspective. Do you want to hire someone who'll leave in 12 months when something more suitable to his desired career path comes along, or would you rather that he "self-select" out?

A good barometer for whether a decent college grad should take a job is how elite business schools will perceive the work experience-- they generally require four years of real-world work experience in applicants. I'm not saying that everyone needs to go to Harvard Business School (I most likely won't) but that people should only take jobs that are putting them on the right track.