There should be little sympathy for college graduates struggling to earn a livable wage

Consider the following:

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According to the study’s findings, 60% of students acknowledged cheating most of the time, while 30% admitted to cheating at least once during an online exam. According to a prior survey, 80% of students participate in academic cheating.

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A lot of the faculty members I’ve talked to frequently say, I don’t know what’s going to happen to these students once they enter the working world. We’re not talking about, wow, they didn’t read Moby Dick. We’re talking about these fundamental critical reading and writing skills that students are really struggling to master, and maybe even don’t necessarily see the point of mastering

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Something’s happening with college students in reading. Or maybe it’s better to say something’s not happening. College professors are used to assigning work that doesn’t get done that comes with the territory. But many now say that their students are coming to campus woefully unprepared. The class of Gen Z, born in the iPhone age is struggling to read and comprehend long passages. They may be distracted by a barrage of social media. Some of them, professors will tell you, don’t see the point of learning at all. Why is this happening? What does it say about what college is for? And is there anything we can do about it?

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Yeah, I think there are a lot of things going on here. I think the rise of social media has really changed the way we think about text and about reading. I think about this particular professor I spoke to who is an English professor, and he said, you know, he always would ask his students to tell a narrative about their own interaction with reading, their own reading history. And not that long ago they would talk about, you know, reading for pleasure or having their parents read to them at bedtime, you know, Harry Potter books and things like that. And in the last few years, they talk about things like reading on TikTok, reading on Instagram, texts, you know, so the way in which we’ve read has sort of shrunk and fundamentally changed.

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Galli Robertson is not alone in clocking a change. Much has been made of students’ spotty classroom attendance and disengagement from their work. But a less-discussed dilemma may end up mattering even more: Students are struggling to complete significant work on their own. Some professors — who see a big paper or project as integral to assessing what students know and can do — have cut down on other parts of their courses so that students can pull it off.

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There's growing discontent with our national economy because inflation and housing prices make it difficult for young people to feel like they can invest in their futures. They supposedly "can't" buy a house, build savings, or enact their standard of living because their employment status and potential wages do not match the cost of living where the jobs are for college graduates. Gen Z in particular have even eschewed traditional forms of work, joining millennials who see "work from home" as a right to life" along with the prospect of earning a high income through social media content and online shops.

Now, I'm not saying there aren't problems in the world. However, there's a lot of shite thrown at universities for their inability to prepare kids these days for the workforce. There's growing sentiment that vocational schools and the trades are a better avenue. I completely agree but not so much to avoid the indoctrination of progressive idealism but more so because most college graduates aren't actually college material.

If you can't read, comprehend, decipher, and apply long passages in order to generate unique personal insights on complex problems/prompts because you'd rather doom scroll Tik Tok, you shouldn't be in college. If you can't be bothered to attend class or make an effort to complete assignments that the professor has deemed essential to proving you've engaged in higher learning of a subject, you shouldn't be in college. If you're cheating on exams and failing to see the value of assessments in determining your learned knowledge because college is supposed to be a simple transaction between a consumer and their "deserved/entitled" wealth, then you shouldn't be in college.

And you damn well shouldn't be a college graduate and you certainly don't deserve a "livable wage" in metro areas with professional jobs.

I know we've beaten this topic to death, but often we criticize the colleges, deservedly so, but the coddling of these iPad kids has led to a horde of spoiled brats who think the world should be a playpen instead of a place that requires hard work, sincerity, and integrity in all things they decide to do. Life isn't content consumption.