Graduation season is here!

But instead of planning for a year abroad or embarking on exciting new careers, many new grads are instead paralyzed with fear over a weak job market and crushing debts.

“I am a slave to my student loans and I cannot take it," says Flickr user Rhiannon. She's a 27-year-old graduate of Arizona State University.

Related: Generation I.O.U. Slideshow

In 2011 two-thirds of college seniors graduated with roughly $27,000 in student loan debt. More than 38 million Americans owe more than a combined $1 trillion in outstanding student loans.

If you are a parent or a student, you know that college education costs have skyrocketed in recent years. What you may not know is that the annual cost of a four-year degree has risen three times as fast as the rate of inflation since the 1970s.

Why the U.S. higher education system is broken

What makes this crisis worse is the fact that finding a job after college graduation has becoming increasingly difficult in this tough

Investors are learning - the hard way - that when something seems too easy, it almost certainly is.

For most of this year, the idea of riding stocks higher - even buying successive new highs in the U.S. indexes – has been viewed as a path to effortless gains, supported by central banks’ easy-money resolve and a resilient (if moderate) economic expansion.

Now, suddenly, a cocktail of worry is served - its ingredients global-growth fears, unclear central-bank intentions and a market tape that had been stretched far to the upside. The mixture is a bitter one, most dramatically spurring a 7.3% buckling of Japan’s overheated Nikkei stock index as well as a shudder of downside volatility in U.S. stocks.

Related: Bernanke Speaks: Can Anything Slow Down This Market?

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (GSPC) had been “melting up,” in the common description, climbing a gentle slope to a new record at 1669 Monday, up 17% on the year and 23% since mid-November, without so much as a 4% pullback.