According to a recent study by MonsterTRAK, the student-oriented division of Monster.com, almost half of the recent crop of college graduates are planning to move back home. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that the job market has stagnated, the cost of living has soared, and inflation has rendered many entry-level salaries insufficient to support the average Newfoundland puppy, much less an actual human being.

While it's surprising that 48% of the class of 2008 has elected to trade a dorm room for a bedroom, what's particularly telling about MonsterTRAK's poll is its information about the class of 2007.

While a comparatively small 22% of that class originally planned to move home for more than six months, a whopping 43% are currently sleeping in their old beds. It would be all too easy to pick on the latest crop of millennial graduates, pointing out their inability to cut the umbilical cord. However, the simple fact of the matter is that the current economic downturn is transforming independent living from a rite of passage into an almost unaffordable luxury.

Grad school to the rescue!

Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around cheapskate. The idea that grad school is the only solution for a depressed job market is ridiculous. There's also the Peace Corps.

Welcome to WalletPop's series "You've graduated. Now what?" Our bloggers have a wealth of suggestions to help you find you way through that time of amazing transformation, from student to working stiff.

Warning: This flies in the face of all the responsible advice you're getting from other Walletpoppers. Yes, you should get a job. Yes, and start saving for retirement. Oh, and don't forget about cleaning up your credit, saving for a home, starting your career, yadda yadda yadda.

Or, you could dodge all that for another year and go abroad.

You knew this day would come. It's your graduation day. Some of you will embrace it. Some of you have dreaded it. In either case, it's here now and you probably have only one thing on your mind; What do you do now!?!

I'll spare you all the flowery cliches and the over used "it's your world now" dogma. The fact of the matter is that you are entering a world as graduates, which is unlike anything anyone can reminisce about. Don't take it too hard that the road maps to life which we might provide for you are outdated and nearly useless to you. I suggest that the challenges before you are what your further education was really all about. If you had wanted to slip easily into a precut groove, you would probably have opted against furthering your education in the first place. However, you didn't avoid the challenge. For that I applaud you. Now, let's get down to brass tacks.

Welcome to WalletPop's series "You've graduated. Now what?" Our bloggers have a wealth of suggestions to help you find you way through that time of amazing transformation, from student to working stiff.

You've walked the stage and cashed all of those checks your family wedged into graduation cards, now it is time to find a place to live. Unless you are moving in with grandma, your first decision is likely going to be what city, state or continent you want to call home. If you spent your college days in a dorm this may be the first apartment you are looking for and your options as well as the security deposit may be overwhelming! Hopefully the following primer to apartments can help you get your foot in the door to your lovely new one bedroom in the city of your dreams without suffering more regret than a one night stand.

When you start your search learning the lingo of apartments is important; your first step is to determine what kind of apartment you want. Maybe you looking for an efficiency or loft which typically consists of an open floor plan or something like a 2 bdrm with DW, WIC, W/D which nets you a dishwasher, walk in closet and a washer and dryer. The choices are sometimes daunting but after you look at a few units and assess your needs you'll quickly know what type of apartment you are looking for and can expand your search to location.

Just like real estate is about location, location, location; so is your apartment. You need to find an apartment that is in a neighborhood you feel comfortable in, both during the day and when you come in late at night. After you think you have nailed down a location before signing any paperwork, check out the location at night and see if it agrees with you, look for outdoor lighting and listen for trains, planes and noisy neighbors. After you sign a lease these issues will be much, much harder to deal with.

Welcome to WalletPop's series "You've graduated. Now what?" Our bloggers have a wealth of suggestions to help you find you way through that time of amazing transformation, from student to working stiff.

Previous: Decide where you'll spend the rest of your life
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Last summer my niece Cindy graduated from college and came to visit. I told her we needed to have A TALK. She may have been bracing for some trite wisdom or an age-inappropriate tirade on birth control. Instead I hit her with something much worse. I told her the grim news: she should already be thinking about saving for retirement.

Since Cindy is a far smarter kid than I ever was, it didn't take much to convince her of the "miracle of compounding" and how much easier it is to save for retirement when you start young.

Here's an example I found just plugging numbers into an online calculator: A 21-year-old making $25,000 a year and putting away 3% of her income would end up (after adjusting for raises and a 8% stock market return) with $3.1 million at age 65--enough to live on 90% of her last salary. If she started a decade later, she'd have less than half that at $1.4.

It's staggering how much better you'll do in retirement if you start when you're young. It's also amazing that we barely teach our young graduates anything about retirement savings even though the weight of the expense falls is falling increasingly on individuals to manage. Will there be any traditional pensions around when the class of 2008 retires? Or even Social Security?

Congratulations, matriculator! No more teachers, no more books, no more dodging that most unpleasant of tasks: finding a job.

I hope you've put some thought into this during your scholastic career (unlike me, who never gave it a moment's attention) and taken courses that you'll need to get a job in one of the fields likely to be hot in the future (art history is not, alas, among them.) To that end, here are some of the jobs that the U.S. Dept. of Labor expects to be in high demand in the near future:

Education and health services -- With we boomers growing old and cranky, the health field will continue to boom. As we retire from teaching, lots of jobs will open up in schools, too. 3 out of every 10 new jobs will be in these fields.