Andy Rooney: It's Graduation Time
The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney.
This is graduation time at a lot of colleges. The average graduation lasts more than two hours. If you're one of almost two million kids lucky enough to be graduating this year, I can tell you, there aren't many days in your life that will be as good or as sweet or as sad.
You may not want to know, but graduating isn't going to be as much fun this year because what you want now is a job and there aren't as many of them as there are of you. Jobs are always scarce when you're looking for one.
I never graduated from college. Just two weeks after my junior year ended, I was drafted into the Army for World War II. After four years in the Army my father asked me if I wanted to go back and finish college and I just laughed at him - I had whatever education I was going to get in the Army. Maybe you can tell.
I envy all the young people getting diplomas now. There's something about a college campus graduation day that's just great, incomparable really.
One day a few years ago, I sat for several hours in a cap and gown in a steady rain behind a college president as he handed out 516 diplomas. You might think it was a dreary experience, but it was a wonderful experience. Every face of the 516 kids who came up to get their diploma was a life about to be lived and I loved it.
I found myself guessing who would be successful, who wouldn't be, who'd have a good job, who'd be happily married and who wouldn't be.
When some of them were up there, their classmates cheered. They knew why they cheered but they knew something about the person up there that I didn't know.
One big, awkward boy waved his diploma over his head and his classmates hooted. You just knew that he was the one who almost didn't make it - but he made it.
Graduations are not what's wrong with the world.
Written by Andy Rooney