Tsitsi and the rest of the nation who now found themselves degreed and broke, her parents and the parents of the nation with degreed children and still broke, had thought-convinced themselves-that the poverty of their lives could be eliminated by 'professionalisation'.

The time for careers and passions was gone. Hunger pangs displaced ambition.

Instead he was grabbing at whatever was available in this system that no longer held the old predictable relationship between effort and result as true