This is where it will get more ugly if the trend continues. More people will see themselves on the treadmill of futility like what @bennty sees, and that will decrease social trust and cooperation because the economy will be seen as a negative sum game for all but the top few percent (who will continue to see capital growth). Politics will see more people follow extremist ideologies out of desperation.
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Drive is the superpower.
So Iâve been of 2 minds on this thread. I definitely do believe more kids have it worse than the previous generation in many different aspects. On the other hand, the internet also puts out way more information out there available to anyone compared to a generation ago. MOOCs and educational stuff like that, sure, but also career advice. There are all sorts of resources available now that wasnât there a generation ago (or barely was there). You could search for answers to questions on Reddit. If your own collegeâs career center is terrible, go read all the guides and other career guidance material that better resourced elite private college career centers put out on the internet (pretty much all not paywalled). For coding, thereâs Leetcode to hone your skills (and to see how you measure up). Thereâs just a lot more resources out there open to someone resourceful.
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Tell me about it.
Some years ago, when I made even less money, I tried to get the kid into a Jack Kent Cooke program. The toothpulling â months of it â to get her dad to fill out the forms was unbelievable. Like I had to corner him into meeting with me and then sit there while he filled out the form. I had the JKCF staff on the other end of email and I was standing on their last nerve, looking for patience. (She didnât get in; destitute first-gen kids with terrifying immigrant family stories tended to get in. Looking back, I regret dragging her through the process, and am not sorry she didnât make it.) The only reason the NCP Profile app happened this year was because her dadâs wife kindly filled out all the forms, and the prospect of getting her to do that three more times â assuming they stay together â wouldâve been an iffy thing at best. One of the silver linings about State U is that itâs all FAFSA, and despite the changes to FAFSA coming up, itâll still be my numbers going in there.
Iâve long said that if I had one piece of advice to give divorcing moms, apart from âthink long term and donât try to placate someone whoâs gone to warâ, itâs to make sure thereâs something in the decree saying the other parent will fill out all necessary fin aid forms timely. How enforceable it would be, I donât know, but at least theyâd have it to wave. Part of the problem, of course, is that youâve got no idea how fin aid will work a decade or more down the line.
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For someone who grew up as the internet did, this makes all kinds of sense. The problemâs that the kids have no idea how to find anything, no means of evaluating what theyâre reading, weâve gone editor-free, and thereâs oceans of bad and stale advice. So â because theyâre overwhelmed by the chaos â they just do whatever their friends do, or what their parents tell them to do. Itâs not just about resourcefulness; itâs about knowing how to find, evaluate, and synthesize resources. They do get some advice on evaluation in K12, but itâs extremely limited and not great anyway.
In pre-pandemic days, I used to bring librarians in (remember librarians?) to help students learn to do actual research and find relevant pieces theyâre capable of reading. There are some amazing search tools, but unless you go learn about them in college, you wonât know they exist. And then Iâd force them to try finding something themselves, and then make them go meet with the librarians to see how theyâd done and how they couldâve improved. They hate it and donât often see the point. There isnât even any such thing as a ânewspaper of recordâ anymore, so they donât see why a Times article might be any more legit than something from a content mill, or a blog post from 2007, or an ad that doesnât present itself as an ad. (My kidâs friends are aware of WaPo because she reads it, so she tells them stuff from it, sends them links.)
Iâd almost forgotten â one class, long ago, I had kids grow some reality about their trajectories by actually finding job ads in fields they were planning to work in, in places where they wanted to live, and figuring out whether theyâd be able to live in that city/town on the wages available. They had no idea how to find any of this stuff. When I finally steered them to job boards and other places where people advertise, they had utterly unrealistic ideas of what kinds of jobs theyâd be qualified for on graduation. Sent me jobs requiring 10+ yearsâ experience. Similar problems figuring out how to find an apartment and plan getting around. The PhD students I work with are in some ways even more confused â they read conflicting advice about CVs, then hear about resumes, donât know what the differences are, donât know how to read a job ad, and have no sense of timing about applications.
Though this isnât really new. Part of the problemâs that people are just very bad at searching, because to search well you need well-formed questions, or deliberate vagueness thatâs going to coalesce into something well-formed. If youâre unusually good with language, youâll search well, and feed useful terms to algorithms. Otherwise, not so much.
Until you teach these things, itâs easy to forget how much learning went into knowing how to do them. An episode I think about often is getting accosted by a girl in OâHare â her phone was dead, she needed to call someone, there were payphones (!) but she had no idea how to use them. So I taught her, with an audience of millennials collecting around us, but as I showed her, I realized how crazy complex the string of steps was, and how they had to be done in the correct, nonintuitive order or you couldnât place a call. Change out with spare quarters in hand, receiver up, dial tone, change in, now dial, youâve got x minutes, and when the operator talks, DONâT HANG UP, coins in, --or-- read number off to your friend, hang up, wait for return call, no quarters in.
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Yup. Key economist: Nancy Folbre.
I had quite a time explaining this to a bunch of undergrads who accepted that they were going to be saddled with giant scool debt because thatâs just how it was. Just the worldâs wallpaper. We got to talking about loans and interest, and I asked what they thought of 0% ed loans, and they didnât get it: why wouldnât adults with money try to take advantage of them? They expect this. So I explained that apart from general goodwill, and wanting to see kids do well in life, I have an interest: as I get older, more and more younger people will run all the operations of my world. I want them to be good at it. When Iâm old and sick, the docs will surely be younger than I, and I want them well-trained, not skating through med school as cheap as they can. I also want them to be happy and have a strong society, not a miserable warring society that I, too, will have to live in. It took them a while to get their heads around it, and not all of them did.
Itâs particularly thrilling when university employees get all bent out of shape about taxes related to childrearing and pre-K-12 education. Apparently itâs someone elseâs job to produce college-ready 18-year-olds. They do get really, really upset when the kid factory goes on the fritz â theyâre flapping around all over about âthe cliffâ over which enrollmentâs going to fall because millennials forgot to have kids.
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It would need an attitudinal change for sure, but I donât think itâs impossible, and maybe not even unlikely, given Gen Zâs training in looking around to see that everyoneâs okay and being heard. But look where your mind went: the rule says you canât have the machine and you have to play Ghandi at the loom. The rule actually says you can have the machine, but you canât dump the costs of the machine on the larger society, canât externalize. Youâll have to innovate in the sense of figuring out what you can do now with some configuration of machine plus people, and presumably your goal â and the employeesâ goal â is to use them both to push the business ahead into something new and, one hopes, more profitable in some way. More than one way, if you can swing it.
Is it fair to put the entire cost of working this out on the business owner? Maybe not. So maybe we have seed grants or forgivable loans available to subsidize startup of add-a-machine configurations, and out of this we see productivity goosed and a more able, well-trained workforce. Essentially, it says, âWe do want you to innovate and mechanize â but you have to take people with you, itâs not just about you getting rich.â In some senses itâs not very different from (what weâd regard as) progressive labor laws in Europe.
As we are swapping stories, I just donât understand how helpless your students are. My husband and I came to this country from a communist regime, absolutely clueless about how this society works, with zero entrepreneurial skills (not encouraged under the communism), with no working English and no real network of people to guide us through. There werenât career services or any other counseling where we studied. There was not internet either and you could not google anything.
It took us some time but we got oriented, my husband switched to a different subfield that opened a lot of doors, we did some outside-the-box moves that got us permanent status, and it somehow worked out. I worked full time when my kids were growing up except a 3-yr hiatus when they were babies, and did the usual juggling of after-school care without help as a lot of other women (full disclosure â I had a part-time nanny).
Was this a fluke of extreme luck? I have many immigrant friends and they all are doing OK. Not all of us like the lifestyle but most people are well off, and absolutely no one is economically disadvantaged.
I understand the argument that this would be more difficult to pull off today. But I donât understand why college students here are so utterly helpless. We were surely more brainwashed than them.
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Data, I see now where youâre coming from.
First, yes, the ânobody else does itâ thing is a real factor. However, if you look at the schools that arenât sending kids to elites, on the whole youâre also not seeing communities that prep kids for elite applications. Nobodyâs worrying much about APs except for college credit; the activities donât align with the things the elites tend to care about. Sure, you might get a kid who just comes tearing out of nowhere, or a high school 200 miles from anywhere with a magnificent debate or newspaper or whatever coach. But thatâs not usually what happens.
I wrote earlier about SUNY; if you step it back a few decadesâŠSUNYâs weirdly more or less the same. Same mix of hotshots and gravel. Same bureaucratic kludge. (Some of my favorite colleagues are burnt-out, disgruntled, whip-smart SUNY admin. Wonderful drinking partners.) But NYS has always had enough to make these things go: enough really sharp people, enough money, enough populist/liberal goodwill, enough anti-anti-intellectualism, enough industry that really relies on serious brainy hotshots. And itâs done a terrible, throwback job of OOS recruitment â it has no national presence, but what does it need one for? Like I said earlier, SUNYâs an unusual kitten. SUNY/CUNY, the UC schools, UIUC, UMich, a few others where the states have the requisite concentration of wealth and interest in fancypants ed. Iâd forgotten about Colo School of Mines, but sure, itâs got a storied history. Excellent people coming through there a long way back.
If my kid were going to one of the bigger SUNY schools, Iâd tell her to steer clear of those boys â you know which ones Iâm talking about â but ed and opportunitywise, Iâd feel considerably better about her odds. In fact at one point I suggested she just go, set up, establish residency, take advantage of the free-tuition deal. Go live in Ithaca or something where thereâs a high kid-to-normal-people ratio, get a job. But sheâd need to be a much tougher and more independent kid for an adventure like that. You have to take into account who the kids are, too.
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Thatâs why.
This country doesnât make it easy to show up, doesnât make it easy to stay. If youâre an immigrant youâre already cleverer than most of the population here. Youâre usually trying to operate in a new language and managing it, along with the new culture, after having deliberately uprooted yourself with some ambition in mind. This is why I say this country runs on immigrants, has to have them. You will not find a group of more motivated and able people. Plus their kids arenât allowed not to succeed. Iâm still scared of my college roommateâs Nigerian mother, and sheâs an old lady in a wheelchair. Come to think of it, my college boyfriendâs parents, also immigrants. A survivor, his dad. I chose my daughterâs name after imagining his mother shrieking it and deciding it was not only pretty, but could be heard well all the way down the block.
That doesnât answer your question, though, about why my students donât know things, why they donât get up and push, compete, move, figure it out. Iâve been here a long time, and I donât know. Genuinely donât understand it. There are passivities that arenât anything I grew up with, they have their own silent language, and I donât understand. Everything is always fine; underneath are terrible anxieties you arenât supposed to touch. Whatâs valued more deeply than almost anything else is freedom from embarrassment of any kind, freedom from exclusion. The worst thing you can do to a kid is leave a kid out of something or embarrass them. So everythingâs applauded, everyone goes around joined at the hip. If you want to see a lot of deeply indignant adults whoâll never forgive you, tell a kid in public that he didnât do something well. People will literally risk their lives, driving kids hundreds of miles through terrible weather, to take the kid to a sports event rather than have the kid be left out. But no, I canât say that, even after all this time, I understand the culture. Iâd even say that the longer Iâm here, the less I understand. It does make it easy to spot the ones who really do want to get out and are willing to compete.
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Perhaps it is too late to teach most of those who reach adulthood without basic academic skills, drive or initiative those values in college. Time and resources might be more productively spent in early childhood education to overcome parental inadequacies in providing educational support. A successful charter school system here wonât admit students after 5th grade, finding they can instill the necessary values and address the lagging skills then, but not really effectively thereafter.
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I am not sure why OP thinks all of her students should land in elite jobs; even at Harvard, many will not. More will, but in fairness, those Harvard kids are likely far brighter and show more initiative than her students, and those qualities are valued by elite job-givers. Her child has been given a place in a honors program at a flagship and enough extra aid for study abroad and internships, and will have a solid chance at a good career if she chooses to take it. That seems like a reasonable outcome.
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I kind of agree @roycroftmom , you canât complain that students are not attractive to high paying employers while at the same time saying they are basically inept.
I do appreciate the honesty that, at least at some schools, the students are lost. This does go counter to CC convention that students should all take the lower cost alternatives (because all undergrad schools are basically the same) and avoid at all costs the privilege riddled elites.
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Or, for a newspaper website, the distinction between a news article and an editorial or opinion piece (marked as such, but not so obviously in its own section like in print). Or on other websites, where there is not even a marking of such.
It is worth noting that standards for college financial support have changed greatly. No one received money for study abroad or internships when I went to school. Summers were for earning money. Only a few wealthy kids traveled abroad. Now the expectation, even in not well resourced public universities, is that everyone can.
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Do that many US college students actually study abroad?
In any case, the price difference between many US universities and many foreign universities (even for international students) may be such that a US university can pay the foreign universityâs full price plus travel costs and still come out ahead after collecting its own tuition (perhaps even after average financial aid grants) from the student.
I.e. study abroad could be a form of offshore outsourcing applied to college education.
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While there are some aspects of modern parenting that have been good for kids, there are a lot of things about it that has made our children less resourceful, self-reliant and motivated. From what I can tell, that crosses class lines - in many ways children of the upper middle class are just as clueless about figuring things out as their less wealthy counterparts (your example of the pay phone resonated with me). God forbid you tell a kid they could do better or that their work isnât up to par. Weâve become a society of snowplow parents, clearing obstacles out of our kids way - little realizing it has made them less confident, capable and resilient.
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Not as true as it may have been in the past which may also be a contributing factor as to why the educational foundation of many kids isnât as solid.
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A more common example from these forums, whose posters mostly come from the upper middle or lower upper class: no idea of how to calculate or estimate unweighted high school GPA, or even realizing that it may be more relevant outside of oneâs high school.
When people talk about the European model, people either donât know or forget something pretty significant: Most European countries free-ride on the USA for their defense, allowing them to spend more money on social programs.
NATO calls for countries to spend 2% of their GDP on defense, and most of them spent far less than that historically, and many still do. If NATO didnât exist, they would actually have to spend considerably more than 2% to defend themselves, so being in NATO is a bargain, but they still free-ride. Germany is the most notable example.
In a very real way, US taxpayers are funding Europeâs social programs. That is part of the reason they can âaffordâ programs that we cannot.
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That is not at all CC conventional wisdom. Itâs actually quite amusing that those who advocate for elite schools portray âthe other sideâ as anti-elite schools and those who advocate for fit and being mindful of unreasonable undergrad debt portray the âthe other sideâ as elitist. There are definitely a few posters who fit the stereotype on each side, but for the most part, there is no conventional wisdom on CC for either position.
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