I’ll take a stab at this.
DW is employed at a small NE College in a Career counselor role. Her primary responsibility is to help guide college age students to prepare for a career. After a career in this role and previously in Elementary Ed (as an Elementary Ed teacher) she is happily joining me in retirement at the end of June 2023.
Having worked with Millennials and Gen Z students for the past 25 years or so, she’s amazed at the “dumbing down” of the students that she sees.
I wrote previously about the fact that colleges and universities, ever having to fill classrooms with paying students, continue to lower the threshold of admitting standards. So we see more and more folks that would most likely have not made it into college previously, now attending college. Many as they are called “first gen” but not all - that’s for sure.
My wife sees kids that cannot write, they cannot use many features of MS Word (like bulleted lists, indentation, table formatting, etc. for resumes) or Excel for tracking their job search activities. They even have trouble googling topics that they need to research for where to find jobs. (Sometimes she thinks they are really clueless - but she is incredibly patient with all of them)!!
For many who are there as first year students, she has to put up with parents who still want to pressure the adult employee (my wife) to hound their kid to make an appointment with the career counseling office to start to think about career choices. She has to remind these parents that the student is now an adult, and they do not / will not chase the student to come into their office. BTW - the team in the office that my wife works in offer MANY outreach programs throughout the year that reach out to kids via social media, cafeteria tabling sessions, handing out “swag”, employer job fair days, etc. There are PLENTY of opportunities for these kids to take advantage of career guidance and opportunities to intern and interview.
They even offer suits for both male and female students that have been donated to the school so that those who might not own, or cannot afford an “interviewing suit” can borrow them. The only cost they ask for is to have it dry cleaned before returning it to the office.
DW thinks that many of the students that she sees today have been brought up so coddled and so tied to their video games / smartphones that they do not have the skills or motivation to do things themselves. Many come from the “everyone get a trophy” life which is nowhere like adult reality. They also come from homes where the parents did much of the heavy lifting to get the kid to where they are now, and without Mom and Dad, the kids really do struggle to find their way.
OTOH, she’s also amazed by the students that DO come into their office as freshmen wanting to prepare for the outside world. They want internships, they want an awesome resume, they want to learn interviewing skills. And those kids usually get great jobs with starting pay that is WAY MORE than what DW makes!!
Another high traffic direction from students is to “go to grad school”. Many of these students choose career paths which do not require grad school education to get their first job in the field. Some do, and that’s legitimate, but others seem to choose the grad school route to avoid having to get out there and face the real world. Not only that, but many cannot afford the expense for grad school and pile on the debt to pay for it. That’s a shame.
So DW and I believe that it’s all in the way that the student (and young adult) is brought up in terms of taking responsibility for themself, seeking out the resources that they need to help them along the way and making things happen for themselves. This is the land of opportunities still - and the opportunities are there - you just need to prepare for them.
When DW and I see young adults still living with their parents we attribute it to a lack of motivation - the jobs and opportunities are out there - they may just have parents that want to continue to manage their kids (helicopter parents well into the kids 20’s still) and the kid takes advantage of the situation where they prioritize month-long European self-discovery tours, working part-time at the local gym, or maybe even doing nothing but playing video games in the parent’s basement.
How many people know what I’m talking about? How many people agree, or want to throw me overboard for even composing this post?
I’m interested in the feedback.
'38Packard
→ I can tell you what our kids are doing, but I’ll leave that for another post on another day