The sequel to Academically Adrift, the devastatingly honest book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published in 2011, is Aspiring Adults Adrift. Tom Lindsay has a good piece about the book on The Hill.
Among the book’s findings is that, despite the fact that many of the recent grads surveyed are either unemployed or only marginally employed, most of them still think their educations were “worth it” and that things will soon improve for them. Lindsay wonders whether that optimism is based on rational analysis, or merely the kind of clueless optimism that comes from spending many years in schools and colleges where students hardly ever hear discouraging words or get bad grades. I lean toward the latter.