<p>Lots of c students out there right now wowing their employers with great interpersonal skills, knowing how to cut corners to get things done, not having to have “everything” perfect before they move on, being able to think on the go without having all the data and great skills in cooperating and working with others. Its a great skill set. </p>
<p>The skills at becoming a great student are not always the most valued skills in the workplace.</p>
<p>Originally Posted by TheGFG
If a student who was in remedial or special education math all through high school can ace college calculus freshman year (barring 24/7 tutoring all summer long), I’d contend it wasn’t truly college calculus, that’s all. </p>
<p>What exactly are these formerly remedial students majoring in that they would even need to be taking calculus? I know the graphing calculator has made calculus more accessible to the general popultion, but I also remember when only STEM students took it. As a matter of fact I remember a certain person with a Masters in Accounting deciding not to go on for her PhD in Accounting because calculus was required. Yep, you got it, the Freshman level math required for my engineering degree wasn’t required for accounting until the PhD level. So, as I said I know the graphing calculator and the general competition out there has pushed things down. But since when is real calculus a real requirement for non-STEM degrees?<br>
I would have to agree that their idea of calculus must be what button to push. Let’s all call surfing the web computer programming then shall we? Balancing your checkbook now qualifies as high finance?</p>
<p>Add to my earlier post honesty, integrity, hard work and dedication, understanding diversity issues, flexibility, creativity, tenacity, professionalism ( how about not being petty), dependability, reliability , self confidence.</p>
<p>These are valuable skills in which a pedigree education is not needed to develop.</p>
<p>One of my coworkers spoke to me about one of our new hires yesterday. He told me that the new hire reads statistics books in his spare time. The coworker asked him about an advanced topic in statistics (I had seen it mentioned in one of my books) and the new hire said that it was the easy stuff.</p>
<p>If you came into the office, you’d see a lot more of the new hires - the folks that have been there for a long time mostly work at home. So 9/10ths of the job isn’t showing up - it’s figuring out how to get information from others when they aren’t around.</p>
<p>Oh another comment about the remidal math. If these students actually took 4 years of math during high school rather than dropping it the minute the minimum requirement was met, then I’m impressed. I knew a heck of a lot of future teachers and English majors who stopped taking math class the minute they could. Alegbra I and Done! Those same journalism majors will inaccurately quote statistics in their articles as if they had a clue what the heck they were talking about. 4 years of slow math is better than giving up.</p>
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there are some that believe that there should be no advanced math in HS at all. Math education in the HS should focus on basics and getting a good foundation for all math to come. </p>
<p>I am not sure I completely agree with that, just bringing up a point. I am NOT a math person. I stopped in HS as soon as I could !</p>
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<p>How about the senior management of Apple? Google? Berkshire Hathaway? Southwest Airlines? Amazon? Nike? Caterpillar? UPS? eBay? Oracle? IBM?</p>
<p>You can find examples of poorly run companies at any point in history (and more during a severe recession). Some companies thrive, others dive. That’s hardly an indictment of senior management in general.</p>
<p>I also think that a lot of new grads have unrealistic expectations of what their first job will, and should, be. I know my husband gets a lot of new grads expecting CEO type salaries right out of the shoot because some where they read that the average salary is XXX. They don’t seem to take into consideration that they don’t have the qualifications yet to be at that level for that salary or that they live in a lower cost of living area and don’t “need” that salary. He had one guy that told him that after 2 years he would have my DH’s job…um, no you won’t but thanks for playing.</p>
<p>It’s still better than the calls he gets from Mommy asking why her snowflake didn’t get the job…</p>
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<p>roflmao …</p>
<p>^funny but REALLY, REALLY sad that this is not an uncommon experience…for jobs that require a 4 year college degree.</p>
<p>Past time to decommission the helicopters, I would have thought.</p>
<p>My employer used to have a well thought out training program for new hires. That was in the good old days when trained employees were considered an asset.</p>
<p>Today, fresh grads are given a two week orientation and are expected to have team work and collaborative skills and hit the ground running. In other words, employers are re-defining what their expectations are and expect colleges and universities to provide skills which are not necessarily academic in nature. Colleges are academic institutions and they teach some technical and social skills, not as much workplace skills.</p>
<p>As pointed out by others, if you can get someone from elbonia to do the same work at half the price and with 10 years experience, you can afford to be unrealistic.</p>
<p>To put it bluntly, The Senior Mgmt lacks those fine qualities hence they crave for them from younger generations. Talking about collaboration in work place, does mgmt achieve it by pitting employees against each other. </p>
<p>The younger generation is much smarter, energetic, creative and true problem-solvers and collaborative. Lot of times, the current corporate culture and environment impedes the younger generation’s drive to do BIG and BOLD things.</p>
<p>I think our new recruits and interns are so well prepared they knock my socks off. Maybe someone’s HR department is hiring so well.</p>
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<p>And by exactly the same logic, you can surely find examples of some new college grads who are shiftless, and that shouldn’t be an indictment upon new college graduates as a whole. Yet apparently execs, or at least the ones interviewed within the OP’s original posting, felt that they could lecture new college graduates to ‘shape up’. </p>
<p>I would advise senior execs to be quiet and put their own house in order before they tell others what to do.</p>
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<p>Some of these examples some to be rather ironic. Didn’t Apple suffer from a serious options backdating scandal just recently? Wasn’t Jobs’s management style, particularly in his first tenure at Apple, widely characterized as not only ‘sociopathic’ and ‘egomaniacal’, but also deeply unethical, particularly with regards to his treatment of former partner Steve Wozniak and the original founders of Pixar? {Let’s not also forget that Jobs publicly disavowed paternity of his own daughter, thereby relegating both her and her mother to resorting to welfare for years whilst Jobs was a multimillionaire.} Nike - seriously - the paragon of abusive Third World child labor sweatshops? Didn’t Berkshire Hathaway recently admit to an ugly insider trading scandal involving Buffett’s right-hand man (to the point that even Buffett has publicly admitted that he should have realized the truth)? Didn’t Oracle recently agree to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle a case under the False Claims Act involving fraud against the US government in what amounts to the largest settlement ever obtained in the history of the government’s General Service Administration (which has existed since the 1940’s)? </p>
<p>So again, I’m not sure what gives senior execs of those firms the authority to lecture new college grads.</p>
<p>When I see this, it makes me wonder what would happen if workers were surveyed on the strength of their employers’ management.</p>
<p>Those surveys do come up from time to time and there are contests for world’s best boss every year. I don’t know if there are contests for world’s worst boss - I guess it would be hard to make a decision on that count.</p>
<p>There’s a switch in internship focus too, whereas before the intern was paid and did low-level assistant-like work at times. Now interns, at least in our profession, work for free but are treated like law-school summer interns, feted, assigned “meaningful work”, toured around town, and treated w/velvet gloves. Come back to same firm as a 1st year-grad employee, and suddenly they face low-level assistant-like work, long long hours, loss of personal time, etc- they’re in shock, by entry salary, working hours, relatively boring work moments, office hierarchy, and fact their input isn’t necessarily so valued.</p>
<p>SIL’s law firm recruits a new batch of college grads for paralegal positions each year. Firm has become so exasperated over time by their picks from Top-20 schools, given slacker work ethic, complaints about “demeaning work”, and unwillingness to meet deadlines. These high-fliers all want fast advancement rather than fulfill paralegal role. Firm now hires from local 2nd-tier and even 3rd-tier college grads, who are looking to go to law school in a few years. Now 2nd-tier and 3rd-tier law-school grads have a very difficult time landing their first jobs in our major Midwest city, but that’s a post for elsewhere.</p>
<p>Also noted that parental connections are ever so much more important, given depressed job market.</p>