When many X-ers graduated from college, stocking shelves at the Gap was considered a career choice, as jobs were few and far between amidst a major economic downturn. I won’t bore you with the horror show of the low-paying and miserable jobs I had for the first three years after college.

Unfortunately, the future looks as bleak for today’s young people. No amount of coddling by their well-provided-for Boomer parents can save Generation Y and the Millennials from the dire economic conditions they face, including criminal levels of educational debt. Pensions have gone the way of the horse and buggy. You want to retire with health-care benefits, as both my professor parents did? Good luck. As the 1994 movie turned Gen-X mantra has it: Reality Bites.

Generation X chronicler Jeff Gordinier, has written that Gen-Xers suffer from “athazagoraphobia”—“an abnormal and persistent fear of being forgotten or ignored.” Except it’s not really a phobia; it’s been reality for a long time. Maybe that is about to change.

Enter Ryan. While Democrats attack his Medicare plan as “radical” and portray him as pushing granny off the cliff, young people don’t seem to be buying this caricature. Or maybe “radical” is what they want.

Sallie Mae’s report offers a brighter view. It says students and parents strongly agree that higher education is a worthwhile investment in the future and 70 percent think college is needed more than ever. That’s comforting, but several arrows point in the other direction. Almost 54 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed or unemployed, even in scientific and technical fields, according to a study conducted for the Associated Press by Northeastern University researchers. The study said college grads under the age of 25 were more likely to work at Starbucks or a local restaurant than as engineers, scientists, or mathematicians.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that as many as one out of three college graduates today are in jobs that previously or historically have been filled by people with lesser educations or none. The U.S. now has 115,000 janitors with college degrees, along with 83,000 bartenders, 80,000 heavy-duty truck drivers, and 323,000 waiters and waitresses.

Employers, because they realize that many college graduates aren’t really educated, now routinely quiz job seekers on what they majored in and what courses they took, a practice virtually unknown a generation ago. Good luck if you majored in gender studies, communications, art history, pop culture, or (really) the history of dancing in Montana in the 1850s.

Current and former collegians now owe more than $1 trillion in student loans—and only 26 percent of the debtors are currently paying anything back, down from 38 percent five years ago. (These loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, a reform imposed to stymie borrowers who would graduate and promptly file for bankruptcy.)

The older generation, notes Pew, were “the beneficiaries of good timing” in everything from a strong economy to a long rise in housing prices. In contrast, quick prospects for improvement are dismal for the younger generation.

One key reason: their indebted parents are not leaving their jobs, forcing younger people to put careers on hold. Since 2008 the percentage of the workforce under 25 has dropped 13.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while that of people over 55 has risen by 7.6 percent.

“Employers are often replacing entry-level positions meant for graduates with people who have more experience because the pool of applicants is so much larger. Basically when unemployment goes up, it disenfranchises the younger generation because they are the least qualified,” observes Kyle Storms, a recent graduate from Chapman University in California.

Overall the young suffer stubbornly high unemployment rates—and an even higher incidence of underemployment. The unemployment rate for people between 18 and 29 is 12 percent in the U.S., nearly 50 percent above the national average. That’s a far cry from the fearsome 50 percent rate seen in Spain or Greece, or the 35 percent in Italy and 22 percent in France and the U.K., but well above the 8 percent rate in Germany.

We’d better be prepared for more such stories, involving relatives, friends, and—over the course of time—ourselves. The number of Americans over 65 is projected to double between 2010 and 2050, to almost 90 million. The population of the oldest, over age 85, will grow even faster: from 5.8 million in 2010 to 19 million by 2050.

As we age, our driving skills inevitably deteriorate. The likelihood of a car crash begins to rise after age 60 and to rise rapidly after age 70. Drivers over 80 are as likely to crash as new drivers in their teens; drivers over 85 are twice as likely to crash as new teenage drivers.

Fortunately, many older drivers are responsible enough to self-restrict. They drive less and refrain from driving at night or on high-speed roads. These behaviors show up in the statistics. Along with the post-2005 surge in gasoline prices, they may account for a reassuring decline in the fatalities inflicted by older drivers over the past few years. But unfortunately not all older drivers are responsible. Those who wish to test their luck—and everyone else’s—encounter few restrictions. Whereas teenage drivers are subjected to a testing process and gain driving rights usually in three gradual stages, older drivers in most states are subject only to more frequent eye testing.

States hesitate to test in part for cost reasons: testing drivers in person is expensive. But as important as costs is political fear. Unlike the young, the elderly pay attention to politics. (One study has found that baby boomers are 38 percent more likely than post-boomers to answer correctly basic questions about current events.) Older Americans vote, and they unabashedly vote their interests as a demographic group. It’s almost always easier and safer to shift the costs of an aging society onto other groups: to force the other drivers on I-95 to veer out of the way.

“We don’t know what to do now,” Jaime, a Madrid waiter in his late 20s told me last week. “My wife lost her auditor’s job, and I can’t support the whole family. Maybe we have to move somewhere like Dubai or maybe Miami.”

Many young Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, and Spaniards already have made their moves, with a half million leaving Spain alone last year. But it’s not just Club Med youths who are contemplating greener pastures. Ireland, which in recent decades actually attracted new migrants, is exporting a thousand people a week. In recession-wracked Britain, nearly half of the population say they would like to move elsewhere.

Driving this exodus is a growing perception that this collapse is not cyclical but secular. Increasingly, young Europeans are deciding not to start families—the key to future growth—in reaction to the recession. The stories about divorced Spanish or Italian young fathers sleeping on the streets or in their cars are not exactly a strong advertising for parenthood.

Even in once-rigidly Catholic Spain, marriage and fertility rates have been falling for decades, and family structure weakening. Spaniards are having fewer children now than they did during the brutal civil war of the late 1930s. Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe, a Madrid-based management consultant, in his 2011 book, El Suicidio Demográfico de España, points out that the actual number of Spanish newborns has declined to an 18th-century level.

As thousands graduate this month, take comfort: despite the propaganda, research also reveals that we’ve emerged as the most diverse, tolerant, pioneering, educated, and innovative generation in history. Here’s some good news.

(1) The kids are all right (and open-minded). Millennials might care a great deal about their own happiness, but they also care about other people’s well-being—considerably more than previous generations did. We are far less homophobic, sexist, and racist than our parents and grandparents. We are the generation that played a critical role in electing the first African-American president, and most of us believe gay marriage is a right that shouldn’t be denied to same-sex couples. Having grown up surrounded by so much racial diversity, those under 30 are emerging to be the most colorblind in U.S. history—nine in 10 18- to 29-year-olds say they approve of interracial dating and marriage, compared with 73 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds.

And nearly every type of problem that has plagued previous generations of young men is not as pronounced today: psychologist Jeffrey Arnett has found that alcohol use, crime, and unprotected sex among young men today has declined sharply in the past 30 years. And some of the leading intellectuals in the country are taking note. At a panel in Washington, D.C., last year, New York Times columnist David Brooks commented that “while he is down on just about everything else, the under-30 generation gives him hope.”

(2) Twenty-something women are good for the economy. This is the first generation in which women are just as likely as men to want that the top job at the office, which was not the case among female employees under the age of 29 as recently as 15 years ago. In fact, more young women than men today cite career high on their list of life priorities, according to a recent Pew study. It’s no shock then that single, childless women under 30 in many urban areas make more money, on average, than their male counterparts. As The Economist put it, “Women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants, China or India.” And women in their 20s and early 30s are poised to continue making an economic splash, even if they have to get some help from their parents to get on their feet.