I am anxious not only for the same reasons they are—their (and my) debilitating student loan burden, the desperate competition for unpaid internships (with no promise of paid employment on the other side), the concern that there might simply be not enough jobs to go around.

I am anxious, also, for a reason that many of them have not caught onto yet: the mismatch between the supposedly “good” jobs that popular wisdom seems to suggest will definitely continue to exist—entrepreneurial, experimental, start-up jobs, jobs of risk, hustle, and verve—and the jobs my students claim to want. Flipping through a semester’s worth of self-introductions is like an obituary pamphlet for Old Economy employment. Expressed again and again, the desire for mostly public or public-ish, long-term, safe and stable, even unionized, positions: Firefighting, Criminal Justice, Firefighting, Nursing, Nursing, Teaching, Teaching, Teaching, Radiology, Firefighting, Criminal Justice.

Although a few students write, vaguely, Business, and a few more, Computer Science, vanishingly few are writing, unmediated, “I want to start my own company,” “I want to freelance myself as a consultant,” “I’m going to sell myself, I’m going to go where the money is, I have a vision, and I’m going to fight until I get there, on my own.” There’s vanishingly little excitement, to tell you the truth. There’s just explicitly, and I don’t think entirely naively, the longing for a job where you do one thing, easily described, for a long term, and get predictably and sufficiently paid for what you do.

My students don’t want to be Astronauts. They want to be, sort of, Post Office clerks—with a 9-5 and a pension plan.

And, in that case, I don’t know how to break it to them. I don’t know how to sell the alternative—the more realistic future of work, that sort of chance, the chanciest chance I’ve ever sold.