When I was 18, I spent a year and change flipping burgers in one of those restaurants where customers eat from a tray balanced across their car windows. It was one of the three jobs I held at the time, affording a simple budget and enough left over to save up to go to college after a couple of years. I put in hard hours for my employer and it eventually worked out just fine for me. It also makes for a nice story, but one that is embarrassingly dated. The fast food industry in which I worked is not the fast food industry of America today—just ask the thousands of workers on the streets , standing up for same opportunity to get by and get ahead that built the American Dream. For today’s fast food work force, erratic scheduling makes holding down more than one job impossible—you can’t commit to a second employer if you’re on call for the first. At the same time, low wages barely cover basic household needs, leaving millions of workers in poverty despite being employed, and making saving...

With a weak job market and uncertain prospects, young people have to make careful choices about how to invest in their futures. They’ve put off marriage and having kids. They’re moving back home with mom and dad. But the one expense with which they are not compromising is the high and rising cost of college. According to a new study from the Pew Research Center, covered in the Wall Street Journal, young adults have changed their priorities in response to economic instability, but student debt is more common than ever. Pew looked at Federal Reserve data on the debt and assets of American households and found that while young people are avoiding big purchases that require long-term financial commitments—like buying homes and cars—they are increasingly investing in education, with 53 percent more people under 35 carrying student debt in 2010 than did in 2001. It makes sense. Unemployment rates have remained frustratingly high even as US businesses have recovered from the Great Recession...