The American Dream is Dead on Arrival for Many (if not most) College Graduates. That’s the message of the movie The Assistant.

 

The movie (which can be streamed on MAX), albeit boring, is about a recent graduate of Northwestern (Julia Garner) who lands a job as a receptionist of sorts who ends up doing everything from tidying up the office of her boss to holding in her arms the baby of someone who comes into the office. When she goes to denounce what she considers to be an ethical breach by her boss, her case is handled in the most paternalistic manner by the head of the company’s grievance department who suddenly insults her in the most demeaning way. But the clinch of it all is the last scene in which she calls up her father who says how proud he and the mother are of the fact that she has gotten such a promising job. When she tells her father it’s a lot of hard work and stress, he says it’s always that way at first but as time goes on it’ll get better. FAT CHANCE.

What the movie leaves out is that the cost of college education since the 1980s taking into consideration inflation has gone up 129% and that the average student graduates college with a debt of $37,000. Combine that with the dead-end jobs which await many professionals and that more doctors are corporate employees than in the past and most  university professors have non-tenure track positions, and one can easily reach the conclusion that the American Dream has become an unqualified myth.