Commentary: Longing For Adulthood

By: Jackson Hamilton, Guest Writer

I went to the College of Charleston for more years than I wish I had. With over 130 credits, I never got a degree. Roughly a third of the students who attend that institution don’t graduate. Many drop out as seniors and some, like myself, dropout with over the 122 credits required to graduate. Being autistic and having a few other conditions, I could not finish two of my four foreign language classes and two math courses. Otherwise, I completed everything. I applied to the disability office on three occasions, in person, but was rejected on the basis of the age and/or quality of my documentation. 

I actually attempted to file an ADA lawsuit but my lawyer lied to me, told me he filed it, and never did. Whatever violations of bar association ethics my attorney committed are beside the point. The point is that I am one of many people who are high-functioning and deserve an adulthood but through unhappy circumstance are not afforded that. I have three years as a legislative staffer and have completed the requirements for a political science degree. Like many people my age, on the border of Millennial and Gen Z, I am living the life of an adolescent with the education and skills of an adult.

As a legislative staffer, I mostly did communications such as ghostwriting speeches, newspaper editorials, and social media posts. I also authored four bills this past session that made it to committee. The anti-gerrymandering bill am I particularly proud of. I coordinated with urban planners in the COG and North Charleston governments. Regardless of my experience and my over 130 credits of education combined with an alcohol and drug-free lifestyle, I can’t compete with my peers who were lucky enough to jump through the hurdles to, by the fickleness of fate, get certificates which say more about luck than knowledge and skill.

Lots of my peers are in the same position, there is a wasteland of Hoovervilles populated by the eloquent, educated, young, and sober. They live under bridges, work seven days a week as a barista, and have most of a bachelor’s degree. Victims of a society which has abandoned both the decency of social justice and true meritocracy. In a sense, it is a problem with liberal democracy itself which, for its ostensible equality, favors the lucky and that usually means the affluent and able. The classic Marxist critique of liberalism. Contemporary liberalism needs some of Plato’s intellectual snobbery since it led to a belief in meritocracy over democracy and while in extreme form and in civil government, that may not be too appropriate. A platonic meritocracy is how companies and colleges should work.

There is an increasing argument that lots of jobs should not require a college degree. Equally important, a college degree should reflect intellect, skill, and work ethic. Getting out of college with the qualifications one deserves should not be contingent on mental health, disability, socioeconomic status, or anything else. It should be based on two things: brains and sweat. In fact, any middle class job and training for it should be built on brains and sweat. Lots of the people who, alongside me, lost in that fickle and unfair marathon of luck, have the expertise and the metaphorical muscle to use it. For my generation, making it to or remaining in the middle class is a game of roulette.

The ultimate point is this. Our society is becoming both less adult in that fewer people can attain adulthood and less of a meritocracy which means hard work and training do not lead to experts running fields and industries. The people who get hired get hired based on pieces of paper that ever decreasingly represent earnest qualifications and more represent luck like mental health and socioeconomic status. Even if the unfairness, financial ruin this is to a lot of people, and increasing incompetence across fields are put, per se, put aside, it is a threat to liberal democracy itself. Because if the machines are not staffed by experts and the people are poor then the elites will be too uneducated to know how to run a society and the rest will be desperate populists willing to swallow the rhetoric of the con artists who prey upon desperate people. In two words: Donald Trump.

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