Roundup: Summer End Macro Musings

Fall Back to School, Fall Behind Financially

For our annual labors, every year in the U.S. and beyond many are gifted a four-day week to help take the sting out of summer’s end and the return to school or a more regular work load. Not fun, but no way around it.

However, this juncture applies another turn of the painful screw of transition to a specific segment of society. The college graduate.

This cohort must endure a double transition…out of summer and out of student life. I remember that period well. Like many graduates that had experienced a relatively guided path through the narrow channels of school, in 1988 I was “all revved up with no place to go” (thank you Meatloaf), because the economy’s growth trajectory dipped just as my employment needs rose.

With the fallout of Black Monday’s 21% decline (Oct 19, 1987) still reverberating through the canyons of Wall Street, limiting the appetite for campus interviews and a recession looming, jobs for the class of 1988 were scarce…at least that’s how I reasoned it. But I was not alone.

During one of my breaks from the job search, I attended my good friend’s graduation from Williams College. As part of the ceremony, some of her fellow graduates shared a song they penned just for the occasion. The catchy refrain has stuck with me to this day.

Williams College, place of knowledge,
Sixty thou…to live with cows.

First, some perspective.

Williams College is nestled in the Berkshire mountains. Not a lot around it today, so can’t imagine the size of the town when it was established by Col. Ephraim Williams, by leaving a tidy sum to establish a ‘free school’ in 1791. The free school only lasted two years, giving rise to the Williams College we know today that charges tuition. To help secure the school financially, an endowment was created which now stands at , ranking as the 10th largest endowment in terms of dollars per student.