When College Graduates Face Reality
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“History found you.” In 2020, Caitlin Flanagan told recent college graduates that their dreams were interrupted in much the same way her father’s dreams had once been interrupted. In 1941, he was a new student at Amherst College, “and he thought it was paradise,” Caitlin wrote. Then the Pearl Harbor bombing happened, and he and his college peers enlisted in the Army the very next day.
History found both of these generations and left them with a whole lot of plans deferred, but perhaps also something great—“As very young people you know something powerful: that you have been tested, and you did not falter,” Caitlin wrote. “You kept going.”
Caitlin’s essay is one of a series of commencement speeches The Atlantic commissioned in 2020 for students who would not be able to attend their graduation. In them, writers spoke to young people growing up in the shadow of loss, who were watching as humanity as a whole was tested. While 2025 isn’t the same topsy-turvy reality as 2020, students still face a core uncertainty about what comes next. Below is a collection of honest, not-always-rosy, but often hopeful advice for the graduate in your life.
On Graduating
You Thought You Were Free, but History Found You
By Caitlin Flanagan
The 2020 commencement speech you’ll never hear
I Didn’t Get to Graduate Either
By Bridget Phetasy
In May 1998, I should have been finishing my first year at an Ivy League college. Instead, I was in a state-funded halfway house in Minneapolis trying to recover from a heroin addiction.
A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person
By David Brooks
I couldn’t say these things during a traditional ceremony, but these aren’t traditional times.
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P.S.
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Sunrise symmetry: a reminder of the order that exists in this chaotic world,” Courtney C., 74 , from Bermuda Run, North Carolina, writes.
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Isabel