Ladies and gents, it’s true. You’re looking at a fully-employed Ivy League grad with benefits yo! It only took two years and a career switch.

If any other unemployed Ivy Leaguers want to take the helm of this little blog that could (and it would be a pity to waste 150K total page views since inception), please email me at Ivyleaguedandunemployed@gmail.com.

Keep on keeping on!

I’m basically going to defer to the overwhelmingly depressing stats in the New York Times of Gloom for this one.

Student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time last year and is likely to top a trillion dollars this year as more students go to college and a growing share borrow money to do so.

Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt.

Pell grants for low-income students are expected to be cut and tuition at public universities will probably increase as states with pinched budgets cut back on the money they give to colleges.

The Times: dashing kids’ desires to go to college one news story at a time. J/K, it’s actually totally the economy’s fault, so… sucks. Kind of feel like lying under the covers until this whole economy thing blows over? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The worst part about this crushing debt is that it prevents anyone graduating in a recession (ahem…) to be on par, salary-wise, with their peers who graduated in the bounteous time of plenty: aka before 2007.

“I am worried about this cohort of young people, because their unemployment rates are much higher and early job changing is how you get those [pay] increases over their lifetime,” Ms. Rouse said. “In this economy, it’s a lot harder to go from job to job. We know that there’s some scarring to cohorts who graduate in bad economies, and this is the mother of bad economies.”

This whole debt thing is not only preventing grads from saving any money or starting their own companies, but it actually creates a whole new generation of childless, homeless, and other-things-that-require-money-less Non-Adults.

“If you have a lot of people finishing or leaving school with a lot of debt, their choices may be very different than the generation before them,” said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for Student Access and Success. “Things like buying a home, starting a family, starting a business, saving for their own kids’ education may not be options for people who are paying off a lot of student debt.”

Worse, it’s basically corrupting America’s slow-to-marriage youth to go to hell in a handbasket.

In some circles, student debt is known as the anti-dowry. As the transition from adolescence to adulthood is being delayed, with young people taking longer to marry, buy a home and have children, large student loans can slow the process further.

“There’s much more awareness about student borrowing than there was 10 years ago,” Ms. Asher said. “People either are in debt or know someone in debt.”

In fact, even the President wasn’t left unscathed from his Ivy League debts!

“We left school with a mountain of debt,” Mr. Obama said in 2008. “Michelle I know had at least $60,000. I had at least $60,000. So when we got together we had a lot of loans to pay. In fact, we did not finish paying them off until probably we’d been married for at least eight years, maybe nine.”

Even then, Mrs. Obama said, it took the royalties from her husband’s best-selling books to help pay off their loans.

So there you have it: the only way to get out of debt is to publish a best-selling book right before becoming President of the United States, as NYMag’s Pressler cleverly deducts. Or turning to a life of whoring and its many variations. Either way, really.

Nothing says victim of the recession like "I can't show my eyes in the promotional photos."

In case your life seems miserable enough already, there’s a new Showtime reality show that will put things into perspective! The sex-selling network took HBO’s premise of Hung (a hot, well-endowed single dad sells his ginormous god-given gift to make a living in the recession — surely a story for our times!) and applied it to real people, Real-Housewives-style. And as the NYT‘s Alessandra Stanley notes, Gigolos does not make for the most uplifting television. Rather, it just leaves you with the sad stirrings of “an unsettling desperation.”

Brace, the oldest in the group, sports spiky, bleached blond hair and a Boehner-orange tan. He has already seen the expiration date in the mirror and is trying to find investors to help market the anti-aging product line he calls Ageless Nutraceuticals. He is a sad case, but so is Steve, a failed model who has a 5-year-old son and claims he sells himself to cover his child support.

“I would do anything for my son,” he says with a sickly smile. “Anything, and anyone.”

So if you’re one of those people that likes to wallow in jobless self-loathing while stuffing pizza in your face in between sips of wine (you’re depressed, okay?!), you can watch the show’s premiere tonight at 11 and feel good about yourself again. You’re welcome.

No, that is not where you left the effing stapler, OKAY?!

Have you found yourself more overloaded at work than usual, arguing with co-workers more often, or feeling a general dissatisfaction with the work you’re producing? You could maybe chalk it up your terrible boss, or even more terrible coworkers, or even MORE terrible assignments. But do you also happen to have a laid-off partner? Well then, the Journal of Applied Psychology suggests that’s where the real blame belongs.

After examining couples’ interactions daily for two weeks in Shenyang, China, the researchers found that couples with one jobless person created a hotbed of stress that just kept multiplying between them, as one person is forced to provide support for the entire family while the other descends into a spiral of self-loathing while they both secretly resent each other. Much like missing your subway can just totally ruin your work day, this financial marital stress spills over into the workplace too. As Associate Professor Maw-Der Foo of CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, told Science Daily:

“One of the key findings in this study is that couples are better at sharing their burden than helping alleviate it,” Foo said. “If you feel bad at home there is going to be spillover at work where you will also feel lousy. Going into the study we thought that marital support might help alleviate the stress of unemployment on the family unit, but it didn’t turn out to be the case.”

And according to LiveScience, studies have proved that stress is deadly (and linked to heart attacks, disease, and weight gain). Not sure how much this study will help the stress cycle (“SEE?! There’s scientific proof that my life is terrible because of your unemployed ass!!”), but maybe that static divorce rate is finally going to see some movement? Or, in other words: Reason 469 why the recession is ruining your love life.

...as long as we make less money than you

Forbes broke down the professions in which women make more bank than their male counterparts — quite a feat when you consider that most women earn only 81 cents to a man’s dollar. Some are surprising (construction laborers and vehicle mechanics), some aren’t (bakers), and the rest are kind of obvious (waitresses!). It’s not really clear how they got 15, since they grouped a bunch of  jobs into random categories, but the full list is below:

1) bakers, 2) makeup artists, skin-care specialists and manicurists, 3) interviewers, 4) preschool and kindergarten teachers, 5) teacher assistants, 6) life, physical, social science and health technicians, 7) dietitians and nutritionists, 8 ) occupational therapists, 9) order clerks (customer complaints, ordering service), 10) student admissions, probate and election clerks, 11) painters (construction and maintenance), 12 aircraft and vehicle mechanics, 13) construction laborers, 14) dining room attendants, 15) bartender helpers

Seniority, stereotypes, and minority status are to blame. Let’s end on a hopeful note, shall we?

Despite some signs of discrimination, both men and women generally fare better in terms of salary and advancement in “mismatched” fields, like construction for women and education administration for men (where they earn 31% more than women). Shatkin says he’s beginning to see more men migrate into female-typed fields like healthcare and education because “that’s where the jobs are.” Similarly, women are moving into more financial and professional jobs, like pharmacy and financial management. If the trend continues, wages may begin to equalize.

Soon food will be so expensive that you'll be able to buy a house with approximately 587 lemons.

You know how sometimes when you contemplate the world ending, you think about how you’ll be able to run to the stores before everyone else and start buying random food items in bulk you’d never actually eat unless zombies attacked your city and you really couldn’t leave your apartment again? Well, its sorta like that now.

Everything from your local produce needs to your daily Starbucks habit is going to get more expensive, economists say. In case you haven’t left for your nearest Costco yet because your leg is broken and your neighbors have left you for dead, I’ve conveniently listed some fear-inducing stats below:

• Food prices at the wholesale level rose last month by the most in 36 years. Cold weather accounted for most of it, forcing stores and restaurants to pay more for green peppers, lettuce, and other vegetables, but meat and dairy prices surged, too. Food prices rose 3.9% last month, the most since November 1974.
• At the same time, global prices for corn, wheat, soybeans, coffee and other commodities have risen sharply in the past year. That’s raised the price of animal feed, which has pushed up the cost of eggs, ground beef and milk.
• Many economists expect food prices to keep rising through the end of the year. Consumer food prices will be about 5 percent higher this fall than the previous time last year, according to RBC Capital Markets. That’s up from the current annual pace of about 2 percent.
• Food prices are already the highest since the U.N. began keeping track in 1990.

Yes, anything that allows me to post nom nom baby photos is catnip for this blog.

Duh. These are the wise words of Nicole Imprescia, who is suing her elite Upper East Side preschool for not adequately preparing her 4-year-old for elementary school exams that obviously are a gateway drug to college admissions.

Better start coming up with some kind of Ponzi scheme to shell out $19K a year so your child can start her private school education — and feeling of rich self-entitlement — at the nimble age of 4.

But even that might not shield you from catastrophic nursery failures, as poor Imprescia learned. Your far superior toddler may be dumped into one playroom with the practically public school-educated 2-and-3-year-olds. Worse, she may be forced to spend her time learning about sophomoric “shapes and colors.” [NYP]

Celine Dion is returning to Las Vegas with a mod tribute to Old Hollywood, complete with a 31-person orchestra. But Las Vegas went through a brutal recession after she left in 2007 and is recovering from the crash. Gone are the Cirque du Soleil-style theatrics that saw Dion harnessed to a cable and flown in the air during her first show at Caesars. Instead, she will sing her hits and other unexpected tunes. [BusinessWeek] 

I can think of one man who would make the perfect example for this theory.

In today’s somewhat but barely uplifting news, a recent study of over 7000 Australian people showed that a “badly paid, poorly supported, or short term” job can be as bad, if not worse, than being unemployed.

This may seem self-explanatory, but to anyone who’s ever known the feeling of being on your last box of pasta and really struggling to remember what it’s like to wear normal clothes or have conversations with people that aren’t deliveryman, it’s worth a reminder that, like in love, you shouldn’t settle for a job that just isn’t that into you.

The terrible gigs are categorized as ones where people felt “overwhelmed, insecure about their employment, underpaid, and micromanaged,” along with providing little support and reward. Why, that sounds like nothing most of my friends are experiencing…

According to Health.com, all of the above can lead to symptoms of anxiety and depression. Or just more drinking!

“Moving from unemployment to a poor-quality job offered no mental health benefit, and in fact was more detrimental to mental health than remaining unemployed,” says the lead author of the study, Peter Butterworth, Ph.D., a senior research fellow at the Centre for Mental Health Research at the Australian National University, in Canberra.

Of course, most people can’t afford the luxury of not hating their job and all the mental health benefits that follow, making this development only slightly more uplifting than this. But it does make for a GREAT excuse about why you’re still unemployed, which from personal experience, can be a tricky question to answer. “My mental health is a lot more important than some paycheck, Mom. Canned soup is no longer just for poor people!”

Really makes you want to crack open that flask polish up that resume, don’t it?

“Generally speaking, all the data seem to suggest that if you already have a job, the labor market probably doesn’t seem so bad, but if you’re looking for a job, there’s been almost no job market improvement over the last few years,” Michael Feroli of JPMorgan Chase wrote in a note to clients. [NYT]