DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Gen Zers are getting fired at shocking levels. Here’s why.
It’s easy to blame Gen Zers for their reported laziness and simply tell them to do better. But attributing these failures solely to the personal shortcomings of young people these days is an oversimplification that fails to capture the nuance of the situation. Young people are being raised in a particular environment that’s leading to these worse outcomes, and that means there’s plenty of blame to go around.
One chief culprit is surely the higher education system, which is supposed to prepare young adults for the workforce, but evidently isn’t doing a very good job.
“Many recent college graduates may struggle with entering the workforce for the first time as it can be a huge contrast from what they are used to throughout their education journey,” Intelligent.com concluded in its report. “They are often unprepared for a less structured environment, workplace cultural dynamics, and the expectation of autonomous work.”
That’s right: Modern colleges often infantilize young adults, through “trigger warnings,” safe spaces, grade inflation where it’s easy to get As, and other wildly unrealistic elements of campus life. I’ll never forget one time at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when my dormitory put Care Bears up on the walls — yes, Care Bears! — reminding college sophomores and juniors to drink water, brush their teeth, and sleep eight hours a night. Have you ever heard of a workplace that remotely looks like this?
It is not surprising that college students who “graduate” from this kind of adult daycare then struggle in the real world. And frankly, it’s not even all their own fault.
Who could have seen this coming? “With all the attention being paid to college-aged social justice warriors and microagressions, one has to ask: What happens when all these delicate snowflakes enter the workforce?”
—Ashe Schow, the Washington Examiner, March 26, 2015.
And from earlier this year, our look at what happened when all those delicate snowflakes entered America’s newsrooms.