A new survey has found that recent college grads have trouble transitioning from school to the workforce. Should we really be surprised by this, though? Colleges and universities seem to waste so much time on social justice, DEI policies, etc. When do students even have time to think about what life will be like when they finally graduate and get jobs?
The survey, which Mary Christie produced in partnership with the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Healthy Minds Network, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, and Morning Consult, asked 1,005 young professionals between the ages of 22 and 28 about their emotional well-being. More than half (51 percent) reported needing help for emotional or mental health problems in the past year, with 43 percent screening positive for anxiety and 31 percent for depression. The gender disparity was notable; 68 percent of men self-reported good or excellent mental health compared to 45 percent of women.
No, we absolutely should not be surprised by this. These kids are not being taught the same things of substance that we were taught when we went to school. Moreover, it was never considered the job of a college to emotionally prepare us for work, only to educationally prepare us for work. That appears to be the main trouble here. That the GenZers are expecting to be taught how to cope emotionally, rather than expecting to be taught how to effectively do the job at hand.
Back when I went to school, if you were a Computer Science major, they taught you how to program in computer science languages. If you were a math major, they taught you math and how to use various formulas in practical ways. If you were a business major, they taught you about how to run a business. Not one of my computer science classes, math classes, or business classes took time to teach us social skills (other than what we learned working in group projects and what we learned interacting with fellow students).
We got prepared for a job by learning how to do the job we wanted to do. We spent no time learning about the idea of getting along with others, fitting in, or god forbid living your life on your own. Those were life lessons you learned and understood from what you picked up here and there, but mostly what you garnered from experience. The idea of group projects was in many ways about the experience you garnered about working as a team. Many of those experiences were dog eat dog and feelings did not play a part. You did learn in those ways (many times tough lessons). But nobody was teaching it in a lecture hall.
But that is now the expectation apparently and why our school system is largely failing. Rather than teach the subjects at hand, our teachers are attempting to teach life lessons in some sort of theoretical manner that does not roll over well into the real world. Teaching kids about race and gender and sexual orientation and indoctrinating them with political ideologies literally has zero meaning in the real world.
If you go to a real boss in a real company with nonsense about how marginalized you are feeling over the racial makeup of your co-workers or are offended by the lack of specific individualized pronouns, that boss would look at you like you were crazy. Because if you believe that real world employers cares about your "feelings" more than they care about you getting your job done, then you are in for a very rude awakening.
For our teachers to be teaching our children that everything revolves around feelings and political ideals was always going to be a problem we are starting to feel the effects. While there are (no doubt) some places you could go and live that dream job (the old Twitter under Agrawal perhaps) but those business are doomed (as the old Twitter was) to fail. Even if every American child comes out of school 100% indoctrinated with these ideals about "feelings" there is still an entire world outside of the United States still teaching children how to succeed. All that means is that our of our sad messed up children would end up working for a Chinese or Indian or other non-American boss.
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