When my brother and I bought our books in the bookstore, the clerk admonished our groans at the $500 bill with a chirpy, “But think of all the money you’ll make when you’re done!”

Not only is that value devoid of humanity (what fun is a stack of Benjamin’s? It is what can be done with the stack that is fun?), but that money-laden future is economically false.

A Rutgers’ University study released in May 2012 stated only 51 percent of college graduates since 2006 have full-time employment. That timeline started two years before the market crashed, companies across the U.S. went belly up in bankruptcy and our unemployment rate skyrocketed.

Why are adults still lying about how screwed we are? A college degree is no longer the dolphin’s double backflip—you know, the one in the bright sun Pixar would slow down with some tear-jerking music: the triumphant success. No, a college degree is that chance, again, not a guarantee, we will be able to tread water without breaking too much of a sweat.

This is the mentality that screws a generation; the flat-out wrong belief there will be jobs, even though the markets and economists show there won’t be. What America gets is a whole generation of youth running full bore towards a college degree and a life of comfort: a well-paid, 9-to-5 career that will pay for their children’s education.

What we will have in five years is a canyon filled with squirming, suffocating lemmings: today’s beloved and bright-eyed students.

With the burst of the housing bubble, people flocked to school to escape the failing market. Now, for profit universities are buzzing all over the net like flies over road kill and we are about to witness the final explosion of the education bubble.

Then what? America’s job force will be flooded with the over-qualified. Even another world war won’t get us out of this slump—remember the economic booms during and right after the last two world wars for the winners—because factory work is not the work college graduates feel entitled to get. Did you get a bachelor’s degree in Psychology to push a button for a munitions conveyor belt? I didn’t think so.

This is our reality and rather than casting illusionary visions of a future working paradise for our students to saunter into, we need to be told the truth; we need to be prepared.

Yeah, it sucks but that is the reality. I’d rather brace myself for the blow than get sucker-punched when I walk away from the podium with my diploma.