History's Most Cultivated Underclass

In Canada, as in the U.S. and Europe, workers in their 20s increasingly find themselves wandering the perimeters of their chosen careers. Youth unemployment in this country reached 15.2 per cent during the recent downturn, the highest level in two decades. Yet the top-line number fails to capture the depth of the problem. It turns out that most young people are working—typically in jobs well below their levels of qualification, and often outside their fields. Those lucky enough to get a toehold in their chosen professions have a hard time getting enough hours or pay to support themselves, statistics show. Yet they forge on, from unpaid internship to dead-end contract, giving the lie to depictions of a shiftless generation addled by an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.