By Sarah Kneezle

Gone are the days of sleeping past noon, wearing pajamas every day and skipping class for happy hour.

As 2008 college graduates adjust their lifestyle to face the real world, some students seem to have the odds stacked against them.

Come November, Matt Porter and many of his peers will face nearly $100,000 worth of debt and a struggling economy. To make matters worse, Porter is choosing to enter a field that may be in its death throes—newspapers.

“I am excited to graduate, but I’m also very worried,” he said before graduating from Emerson College in May. “My journalism degree isn’t going to get me what it used to.”

Newspapers across the country are downsizing.

The Boston Globe, where Porter works and described the atmosphere as being “tense,” is on its third round of buyouts and several of the paper’s star reporters, columnists and editors have taken it.

“There’s no certainty in it,” Porter said. “No one knows where the business is going to be in five years; no one knows where it is going to be next year.”

The Seattle Times has let more than 200 employees go in the wake of declining advertising revenue. And a holy broadsheet, the New York Times, will slice jobs from its newsroom after buyouts fell short of its 100-job goal.

Other print journalism students with sizeable debts are trying to find careers outside of their major. Amanda Bergeron, another Emerson grad, has nearly $60,000 in federal and private loans, and hopes to use her degree in publishing or documentaries.

Coming from a working class town in Maine, Bergeron said she was shocked to find that some students end up leaving college with zero debt.

“It’s unbelievable. It didn’t really occur to me that a percentage of parents were able to pay for college,” she said. “One of my roommates sophomore year had a credit card that her parents would just pay off. I have always worked, since high school; I even paid for my own school clothes.”

But it’s not just print journalism students who are facing overwhelming debts. Nick Tully, a 2006 graduate from Emerson College’s film program, pays nearly $1,000 a month and lives in Santa Monica, Calif.

And even though tuition assistance is a $96.1 billion industry, some student loan organizations have folded as a result of a faltering economy. Education Resources Institute, based in Boston, left about 500 students in the lurch after it filled for bankruptcy in early April. Other organizations, including Massachusetts Education Financing Authority (MEFA), have cut their federal lending programs.

Even still, federal loan programs fail to offer students what they need: In the 1976-1977 academic year Pell Grants covered 72 percent of the cost of education; now it covers 34 percent.

In the fall, presidential candidate Gov. Bill Richardson proposed a plan to increase youth public service by forgiving two years of the cost of tuition at a public university for every year of service.

Sen. Hillary Clinton has adopted a similar policy in her campaign platform, where students who serve on year in AmeriCorps receive a $10,000 scholarship. Sen. Barack Obama also has a handful of higher education initiatives, which could cut the cost of college by two thirds.

But even if one of these policies changes, we’re a generation of debt and it is only going to get worse.

(Especially if we don’t have jobs).

Sarah Kneezle is a recent graduate from Emerson College. She has worked on newspapers, in retail and as a waitress to celebrities. A Vermont native, she has hiked the highest range of the Green Mountains—over 280 miles—on the country’s oldest nature trail. Come fall, she has no idea what she is going to do, but she hopes she has a job.