Three months after Lehman Brothers shut its doors in September 2008, Kate McGaughey got a call from the company she worked at doing legal research on oil-and-gas leases. She was being laid off.

With no savings after only five months in her first job after college, she had to take on four part-time positions and sell her bicycle, laptop and musical instruments to keep a roof over her head. She used to joke that her liberal-arts education had gotten her a bachelor’s in unemployment.

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