These teens’ thoughts about the economic crisis left me thinking about all kinds of ways my kids, and the incoming freshmen I’ll be teaching in the fall, are going to be affected by the current crisis.

Like Kiki Vo, one of the students interviewed in the above article, the young people I work with have grown up aware of economic realities. Dropping out of school to support their families is something many have considered.

Since I work at a state college in California, where the budget problems mean tuition increases for already stretched students, I worry about losing students. This semester, the state college grant program went unfunded, and students who started the academic year thinking they had a certain amount of financial aid available were suddenly told, “Oops, we miscalculated. No money for you!”

And yet several of the students in the article spoke of their trust in our leaders and institutions to get us out of this, along with hard work and charity on the parts of citizens. I was struck by that, mostly because I was much more clueless about the impact of government on my life when I was their age. (Also more cynical, but I didn’t really know enough to know what I thought I was cynical about.)

One hope I have that the teens seem to share is that even if another Depression is here, we’ve been there before and made it through. I grew up with grandparents who had been shaped by their Depression-era childhoods; today, I can see my grandfather’s obsession with financial stability as the expression of love it truly was. Passing on that generation’s stories of making do with what’s at hand seems like a good start to helping us all through the coming years.