Posted on 03/29/2025 5:10:50 AM PDT by Rummyfan
I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.
First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.
As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the Saints. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.
(Excerpt) Read more at hilariusbookbinder.substack.com ...
BTTT
It seems to me that all the “this generation” old man stuff has always been about whether they were swallowing gold fish or putting Volkswagen bugs on the roof, or the music or clothes, but never that they are just stupid, there seems to be a lot of voices saying that young Americans are just stupid now, ignorant of everything and uninterested in everything.
I think a lot of us are giving up on talking to them about anything deep.
Granted, he is probably right. But ... the curriculum he apparently teaches, to me, would be resoundingly boring to anyone who doesn’t share his passion for the topic.
I.Just.Don’t.Care.
I’m too pragmatic. I have BS degrees in cell physiology and chemistry. I HAD to get a minor in something outside the sciences. So I opted for business (useful) and psychology (pretty much useless aside from Skinner).
Having said all that, I do worry about how these students will make a living in a business world that doesn’t need the meager value they can deliver.
Thomas Sowell has written that when our society changed to push everyone to go to college, not just a few like before, it dumbed down the education taught.
Plus, exactly zero times did my CS or math instructors push the liberal political BS. I heard that a lot though in my liberal arts courses.
There may be another element to this also. There are less students vying for college admissions than there used to be during the Baby Boomer generation. Colleges are competing for the same students and it’s a buyers market for the young people. Bright, motivated students don’t compete for schools, schools compete for them. If the author is teaching at an average, public school, it’s unlikely that school can compete for the better students. In addition to the difficulty with students he reports, he might also be getting the left side of the bell curve.
The link doesn’t work.
The author blames society.
But nowhere in that piece are the words parent, parents, parenting used...
Funny how that works.
Parents have these kids for two decades, but bear no responsibility for the fact that they can’t read, write, or do arithmetic.
Go figure.
The more we replace low-level work with AI, the worse it will get, because so many humans are not fit for anything BUT low-level work.
The author specifically chooses not to blame K-12 teachers. I think that's a miss. If government schools were better (more interesting, more demanding) kids would grow up better. This seems like a area that should be improved, although it's not the heart of the problem.
And then there's this:
The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages.
Again, I won't say this is the heart of the problem, but I think it's a piece of it. Young people have figured out that the government doesn't care about them, society doesn't care about them, schools don't care about them, and businesses don't care about them. And why should anyone really "care"? That isn't the basis of our society. Our society is based on MONEY. Everything is transactional now. And I think this is a significant problem.
I've seem Leftwing protesters scream about Elon Musk and his access to the Social Security system. They truly believe that the world's richest man is in this just so he can steal Grandma's social security check. Because it's all about money, right? There's no other reason to ever do anything, right? You go get a government job -- why? Well, mostly for the grift and the easy work with good pay and lots of benefits. Contributing to society?? Who does that?? It's about the money.
And very much a part of this is that a lot of young people who get college degrees (the ticket to success!!) and who get good, full-time jobs, find that they cannot afford rent, cannot afford a mortgage, cannot afford a new car, cannot afford marriage or children. Middle Class wages??? Those mostly disappeared around 2008.
If life is transactional, if life is about Money, then young people have figured out that it's all a big joke. They aren't going to get "what's coming to them", so why should they make an effort?
Years ago someone wrote a book "Who Moved My Cheese?" Well, young people seem to realize that the cheese wasn't moved -- it was stolen. $33T deficit, DEI, Inflation, low wages. There's nothing out there anymore. Why bother?
Works for me.
I hated classes like this that we had to take to get an Electrical Engineering degree. I did whatever to get through it and over with. Never understood what the Professor was so infatuated about. If he wanted to be an engineer, I think he’d think the same of it as I did. Some of them made it clear the disdain they had for engineering. But I wouldn’t have just copied CliffsNotes (ChatGPT of the time) for a test question, either. Not that we could do that in the classroom and not get caught…
That’s true.
College curricula mostly churn out graduates for government and corporate bureaucracies. These bureaucracies are being or should be slashed. These bureaucracies include layers of middle-level managers that are no longer needed and a matrix of staff managers concerned with DEI and other elitist agenda.
Elon Musk reduced the work force at X from something like 10,000 to something like 2,000, and turned the thing from a money-losing social media platform into a money-making platform. Meta, Apple, Microsoft followed suit. And now Elon Musk is doing much the same thing in the federal government.
We DO need well-educated people for the sciences, engineering and medicine. But the idea that eventually people who didn’t learn English, History and the other humanities in high school will suddenly learn these subjects in college is a combination of wishful-thinking and stupidity. Besides, lots of people lead happy and productive lives without ideal college educations.
The federal government should END student loans and Pell Grants (and maybe shift a part of that money to ROTC). And, our state governments should shift a lot of high schools from academic programs to vocational programs.
80% of grades given at Harvard and Yale are A’s and B’s.
And a goodly portion of their grads go into the public sector.
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