Andy Rooney: It's Graduation Time

(CBS)  The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney.

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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

[LPotler]

I enjoyed Andy Rooney's comments and was delighted to see that the video included some film from an earlier graduation from The College of Wooster from which I graduated in 1960. It was (and in many ways still is) a relatively small liberal arts college in the Midwest (Ohio). My time there was a very meaningful experience for me, It also was very nice to be individually recognized at the graduation ceremony.

Lynne (Marilyn) Potler

[SperrySphere]

I cried watching my youngest child recieve her high school diploma, because she was the last of 7 children. Graduation is the greatest experience a person will go through in life. It truly is the first day of the rest of your life, and it's well-earned.

[willcaine]

I remember getting my MA in 1969. Suddenly there were hundreds of applicants for every teaching job. But somehow I survived and prospered. So 2009 graduates, you may have to take MacJobs for a long time, but this too shall pass.