I'm also a recent graduate and I can confirm everything you've said. Both me and everyone I know in my age and social group are feeling more hopeless and jaded than ever.

What are your classmates saying? Since our class has little to no power, representation or money, I'm very pessimistic about the odds of anything ever changing.

Hey, which college or country are you from? if you aren't comfortable with it publicly, you can send me a mail. Asking because I am curious although I might be 4 years younger than ya (going to a college rather than getting graduated)

I am actually at a bit of cross-roads myself as the degree would cost 30k$ where I live (for context I live in India) and so the competition and job market is so much that I would only recoup the tuition fees in 2 years. There are some other colleges if I just wanted a degree for the sake of it which are cheaper but literally 0 companies come to them and I would have to look for higher studies (masters). I would actually love some suggestions, I have went more in depth at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097377

I am unsure of how much the industry might change 4 years from now, my only idea is to probably learn more about how things work and to have them around my curriculum and get good grades as this time it would be something that I am interested about (I wish to learn compilers, fpga, for some reason I really want to read golang codebases), I don't know how the job market might be when I land but its really messy right now and I am sorry that you are in the crossarm of it all.

I once made a project[0] on how many words a person has written on hackernews and you have written 60k words on hackernews and so have been a very decent member of it and I think that's because of not external factors or goodhart's law where something becomes a measure but rather because you genuinely enjoy doing these things. I completely understand your pessimism as I feel like I might be in the same boat albeit younger but it feels incredibly unfair to me for all the things that are happening in the world.

I think that being part of the community shows a level of curiosity which is atleast worth a interview or to get to know them more about it, I think that all you want is just a way for you to prove yourself and your skills. I urge the more experienced folks who might be looking for an applicant to perhaps show some support to @tavavex and give them an option to explain themselves.

Not sure if an interviewer reads it and you would actually get an interview and more chances to prove yourselves but the job market is so fundamentally broken at the moment with fake jobs and so much weirdness that even seniors sometimes don't find jobs & another part is that as college graduates, we worry about all the money and time spent on it and all we want is a fair chance. So I just hope that my comments atleast tries to nudge it towards that, perhaps I recommend taking part in the who wants to be hired thread within HN too.

Sorry this got long but I understand this struggle in some sense and its hard to explain but I have tried to try to do best in both explaining it and hopefully helping you out and I hope that you find a decent and stable job.

[0]: https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/