First off, I think this is a sensationalized article. My friends with liberal arts 'academic' degrees are finding jobs. Not always professor level jobs, some of

First off, I think this is a sensationalized article. My friends with liberal arts 'academic' degrees are finding jobs. Not always professor level jobs, some of them are teaching high school, others are adjuncting, one writes contracts for the DoD (her degree was in creative writing). 'College professor' is currently a middle-class job and it has been for a long time (since before I was born at least). What we have in this article are stories from people who are in the middle class and hit a bump in the road, and never recovered economically. This can happen to anyone, including you, the silicon-valley start-up STEM uber-programmer. It is just bad luck and highlights the lack of a societal safety net. In short, this is a shock piece describing something that is very common in the USA. It is shocking simply because our mental image of a 'College professor,' is a well-to-do clean-cut person in a tweed jacket scribbling on a chalk-board. You don't think to yourself 'homeless prostitute,' (the examples were clearly very specifically picked). The contrast is intentional. This isn't to detract from these people's plight. It is certainly a real one (maybe an example of one of the most real things that can happen to a person). The majority of us are a couple of unfortunate life events away from making the decisions that these people had to make. Lose your job and have an expensive illness at the same time, you'll pretty much be there. These people started behind because of massive college debt, for the most part, but it doesn't change that we're all close to this. I'm disheartened that this is being reduced to in economic terms 'a supply-side problem,' under the assumption that the economics of supply and demand actually apply to a person who is (for all purposes) not making a living wage and in debt to their eyeballs. It's bullshit if a person is employed 60+ hours a week and they aren't able to properly feed clothe and house themselves (and their family, for that matter). It doesn't matter what the job is. Honestly, it's bullshit that we have homelessness and hunger at all. At what point do we have a serious conversation in the west about attempting to become a post-scarcity society? I don't think we even know what is involved to make a society like that tractable.