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Published: 13 May 2026

Thank you, Chancellor Faraday, for that introduction. I see you've finally forgiven me for the incident at the 2019 homecoming gala. The goat was unharmed, the charges were dropped, and I believe we can all agree that "emotional support animal" is a flexible designation in 2026. Though I still maintain the Chancellor's office has much better acoustics for that sort of thing than the student union bathroom, but you live and learn.

Dean McDonald, regents, faculty, and of course the Class of 2026 — or as I like to call you, "the last graduating class before the AIs started doing everything better." Welcome. I'm told my honorarium this year is being paid in Bitcoin, which is adorable. I haven't seen Bitcoin since I used it to buy a boat in 2021. The boat sank. The Bitcoin would be worth forty million now. Let's not dwell. I was offered this gig by three universities this year, but Yalvard pays in crypto and I'm a gambler. Also, Dean McDonald still has those photographs, so here we are.

Ladies and gentlemen, and those of you who have spent four years explaining your pronouns to your grandparents: you made it. Four years ago you arrived at Yalvard bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to take on the world. Today you depart slightly less bushy-tailed, significantly less bright-eyed, and carrying roughly $340,000 in debt that your new AI financial advisor — which you subscribed to because TikTok told you to — has already classified as "catastrophic."

Let's talk about the world you're entering, because someone should, and your parents are currently weeping into their third mortgages.

You are the first graduating class of the second Trump administration. The first class to watch a president pardon himself preemptively. The first class to see the Department of Education renamed "The Department of Winning." The first class to have your federal student loans managed by a blockchain startup whose CEO is a 19-year-old who dropped out of this very same institution last year. He's doing great personally. He's on a yacht. You're here, in a rented gown, listening to me.

The job market, I'm told, is "evolving." That's one word for it. Another word is "obliterated." The AIs have eaten copywriting, coding, graphic design, paralegal work, and most of junior finance. The only growth sector is "AI ethics consultant," which is just asking robots to do things slightly differently until they stop hallucinating. You spent four years learning to think critically. The robots spent four years learning to be critical thinkers. They won. They don't need Adderall. They don't have student debt. They don't wake up at 3 AM wondering if their philosophy degree was a colossal waste of time. You do all three. Congratulations.

But let's not be entirely bleak. There are still opportunities for the enterprising Yalvard graduate. For instance, "AI ethics consultant" is a booming field, mostly because every tech company needs someone to say "maybe don't do that" to the greedy child-CEO before they do it anyway. You'll be ignored, but you'll be well-paid to be ignored, which is essentially what your professors have been doing for four years.  Enjoy wearing the other shoe.

I see some of you shifting uncomfortably. Good. That discomfort is the only honest emotion you'll feel for the next decade. Embrace it. The Class of 2026 has one advantage no previous generation possessed: you have been thoroughly inoculated against hope. You watched democracy teeter, climate collapse accelerate, and three separate viral panics the Boomers called pandemics come and go while your professors told you to "network more." You are resilient in the way that only the thoroughly disappointed can be resilient. You are cynical, exhausted, and deeply, deeply online. In other words: you're ready.

My advice? Aim for the gig economy, but aim high. Don't just drive for the ride-share app — start the ride-share app that exclusively serves people fleeing climate disasters we chose to ignore. Don't just make content — make content about content, then sell NFTs of the commentary. The real money is in the meta-meta-economy — by which I mean cryptocurrency that may or may not be worth anything by the time you finish hearing this sentence.

And remember: no matter how bad it gets, you will always have your Yalvard degree. You can frame it. You can burn it for warmth. You can use it to scrape ice off your windshield when your car — which you will lease at 18% APR because your credit score is a picture of a dumpster fire — won't start in the February of your discontent.

To the parents in the audience: I'm sorry. We told you this was a good investment. We were lying. We always knew. But the endowment thanks you.

To the graduates: I present you to Chancellor Faraday and the board of regents, who are already calculating how much your eventual donations will offset the lawsuit settlements from the 2024 dining hall cronut-induced gastrointestinal rebellion. Dean McDonald is already drafting the press release distancing the university from this speech. You are the Class of 2026. You are not the best class. You are not the worst. You are, statistically speaking, the most heavily medicated, which is frankly the only rational response to the timeline we've constructed for you.

Go forth. Sell something. Sell yourself, if you must — the gig economy has an app for that now, and it probably involves blockchain. And if all else fails, remember the immortal words of Yalvard's founder, John Pearson, inventor of the modern cracker, who on his deathbed reportedly said:

"At least I invented something."

You haven't yet. But you've got time. Not much. The robots are coming. But some.

Good luck. You'll need it. We all will.

 

Meadow
Editor-in-Chief, IRREVERENT Magazine
Yalvard Class of [REDACTED], delivered May 14, 2026.