Joshua Friedeman, the Millennial Perspective

As I was scouring the internet recently, I found an article that seemed sadly indicative of the world in which we are living...

The Telegraph  reports:

Trina Thompson, 27, claims Monroe College in New York did not do enough to help her find employment.

She is seeking to recover the £42,000 she spent on getting her degree from the college in the Bronx.

Court papers showed that Miss Thompson claimed the college's career centre did not provide her with the right advice or tips on available jobs.

"They have not tried hard enough to help me," she wrote about the college in her lawsuit filed at the Bronx Supreme Court.

If this were just a single instance in which someone acted irrationally because s/he thought that s/he deserved something then I wouldn't be writing this. Unfortunately, this is just one example of a growing problem in this nation - the mindset of entitlement. Homegrown in a land of government welfare, some of my peers believe that they deserve certain benefits. Unfortunately for them (and often, by extension, us) this is often not true.

What caught my attention in this article was the statement "They have not tried hard enough to help me." Here's the thing: "they" don't have to. A college doesn't exist to provide you with a job; a college exists to qualify people to enter into professional careers, prepared for success in a competitive world.

The other thing that jumped out at me was this: What on earth did the college do to warrant getting sued? Perhaps the most important aspect of an education is personal discipline. A disciplined lifestyle will not only help you succeed through your academic career, but through your professional career as well. However, this means that it is hard to blame anyone but yourself for the outcome of your education.

Some time ago, something very simple was communicated to me that sums up much of the conservative ideology: conservatives believe in equal opportunity, not equal outcome. As far as I know, Ms. Thompson had just as much of an opportunity as anyone else to find a job, the fact that she didn't find one, while unfortunate, is of no fault to the college.

Now, is this an extreme example of the larger problem that I am addressing? Undoubtedly. But it does illustrate a growing trend in our society. Citizens are beginning to expect government health care and welfare and retirement handouts, but these are not things that the government owes us or that the government is constitutionally obligated to provide to us. As American citizens, we need to always be wary of falling into the mindset of entitlement.