American Millennials are among the world's least skilled

asroc said:

I know, right? I forwarded fifteen memes today and they still expect me to go to work to get money! (I don't actually know how to use my computer or my phone though, so I might have done it wrong. Honestly, without this app, I'd be completely lost.) When I was a kid we got a trophy every day just for going to school! (Also if we didn't show, because otherwise it would hurt our feelings.)
But now everything is soooo haaaarrrdd! If only I was smart and hardworking like the generation that came before us. Them with their booming economy, making a living wage with only a high school diploma and inexplicably inferior genetic material after 1980...

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Omg totes magotes! At least I think totes magotes--your post is long so it's so hard to read lolz I can't even with literacyballz. You must have gotten, like, even bigger trophies than me! Dood I went in for a second degree a couple years ago and they expect me to convert kg to lbs and I was all, what even is this?? x 2.2? Is that a 22 with a dead bug in the middle or what? And then I got confused and scared because no one gave me a trophy for trying and I wasn't praised constantly for existing!!!11!!! I'm so over it. Whatev. I would go on Pinterest for cool trophy-for-existing ideas to give myself but I can't remember the thing you type in the magic white rectangle at the top of the computerbox.

Shit's hard. Yolo.

Amadan said:

"Computers in every classroom" and the assumption that every student needs a laptop or a tablet to be "prepared for the modern world" is one of the culprits, IMO.

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Computers are certainly necessary thesedays, but they are far from sufficient. I think who it mainly helps are the few students who are motivated enough to spend their time on No Excuse List.

I have seen this myself about Millennials - they pride themselves on being more tech-savvy than their elders (ouch, it hurts to think of myself as "the older generation"), but the thing is, we actually had to learn how to use technology. A lot of "tech-savvy" Millennials are tech-savvy only in that they always have the newest devices and are constantly tracking the latest memes. When it comes to actually knowing how to make productive use of technology, troubleshooting it, or creating with it, if there isn't an app for that, they are clueless.

This is a generalization, of course. Certainly there are lots of smart young people who really are cutting edge technologists, but I roll my eyes at the equation of "Knows how to use a smart phone to read Twitter" with "tech-savvy."

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Yes, exactly. The irony is the companies who make these things have spent huge sums of money over decades (read up on the Xerox Alto and its influence on modern computers) to make these things as easy as possible to operate, and ease-of-use research is ongoing - it make a lot of difference to whether an app succeeds (and gets bought up for Big Bucks - Instagram had something like 16 employees when FB bought it for a billion dollars (!) - "do the math," as they say).

Zoombie said:

So, the solution: Spend even less money on education!

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Diana Hignutt said:

That way we can buy more shit to blow people up! Yay!

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This is another irony. To win wars, you really need smart people making new products (to be destructive in new ways). Wars and militaries have been a major pusher of technology, as this cartoon demonstrates.

Also, the Albert Einstein letter.

To be clear, every generation has its faults, my own being no exception. And the game of "Your generation sucks! We were the last good generation," along with "Kids today" vs. "Our parents left a mess behind that we have to pay for" has been going on and will go on forever.

That said, yeah, each generation should address its own flaws, and other generations should recognize that those before and after them have challenges different from their own.

One can complain (legitimately, I think) about Millennials' sense of entitlement and weaker work ethic, but you can't do that without addressing how that came about (spoiled and over-indulgent Boomer and Gen-X parents, employers that no longer make even a pretense of valuing employee loyalty and service). Likewise, I think I graduated at the tail end of the "A college degree is your ticket to a good career" era, but that's still a myth being peddled hard, the result being that lots of Millennials have useless degrees from watered-down programs, and a staggering level of student debt that has been made almost impossible to discharge thanks to creditor-protection legislation.

So we come to this:

Zoombie said:

So, the solution: Spend even less money on education!

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You say that sarcastically, and while I agree we shouldn't necessarily spend less on education, what we spend now, we spend very badly. Much of the money being pumped into various education programs might as well be thrown away for all that it is actually benefiting anyone. So the impulse to cut education programs, while perhaps short-sighted, is not entirely misguided. Do I want to spend more money to send more people to college who probably don't belong in college and won't find that it helps them get a job? No. Do I think every elementary school student needs a laptop? No. Do I think almost every single education system, from elementary to university, is top-heavy with overpaid administrators and unnecessary offices and departments that are nothing more than academic sinecures? Yes, and unless you talk about axing some of that deadweight, I'm unlikely to vote in favor of "giving more money to schools."

amergina said:

I would juuuuust point out that there are very likely Millennials on AW.

Something to remember about when ranting about them.

(I think I'm generation X? My parents weren't baby boomers, though... they were born just before the US entered WWII.)

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*raises hand*

'Sup? Born in '96, solidly a Millennial.

Having just struggled through an extremely dense and educational quarter, topped off by a difficult finals week at the University of Chicago, I have no patience for being questioned about "what am I learning these days."

Come on. When has a generation ever been impressed by their successors? We're having a hard enough time making it in a world that's changed so fast that nobody has any up-to-date advice for us to help us succeed. Nothing is the same anymore, despite the desperate wishes of a wide majority.

Do you really think we also need to be told that we're stupid and entitled by the very people we look up to for guidance?

StormChord said:

Do you really think we also need to be told that we're stupid and entitled by the very people we look up to for guidance?

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Hey, that's what my parents' generation told me! Why should you have it any easier?

(But seriously, we also thought our world was changing so fast that nobody could give us useful advice and the older generation just didn't understand that - plus ca change...)

robeiae said:

This is why we need universal basic income...

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So millenials can spend all their free time on No Excuse List, doing projects in Make Magazine, solving the problems on Project Euler, joining maker/hackerspaces, writing their own smartphone apps and in general being awesome, instead of angsting over "I don't have a job and despite my best efforts I may never get a job..."

Amadan: I would love to listen to help from the older generation. Please! Heaven knows I could use it! I don't know what I'm doing, how should I? If there's useful advice to give, I'd love to hear it, but a blanket statement that we're all stupid and overconfident doesn't come close to helping! It just wears us down and makes us less and less trusting of the very people who can help us the most.

People are so quick to declare that we're a hopeless generation and to blame it on our new tech, but very few people are willing to try and help us. It's just too easy to write us all off.

I'm another early Millennial. I definitely won't disagree that some Millennials have issues, to put it politely.

My personal favorite anecdote is of a classmate I had for a group paper. I was collating and editing all of the sections each group member wrote (in addition to writing my own sections) but I had to leave her section out of the draft for professor review. Why? She didn't cite a single source. When I confronted her about it she said, "I didn't know we had to cite sources." This was a graduating senior at a major university who copied her section into a document just below another section with citations and just above the works cited page.

I spent all semester hounding her about citing her work. For the final draft she gave me a section with citations. Not a single one matched up with our source numbers (or was even close) and there was some information "cited" that did not come out of any of our sources. Yes. She had just put random numbers after her sentences.

More than a few of the students in that class did not inspire confidence and these were kids getting ready to graduate into the workforce. My only hope was that they would be closely supervised because they had no idea what to do with the information they had learned. They were really good at repeating it back to you but had no real ability to contextualize or synthesize.

So, even at the level of major universities in rigorous programs there is an education problem. I think a big part of it is related to how difficult and time consuming good teaching is. For a professor teaching two or three 100 student sections (or even 50 student sections) in addition to researching, writing and critical thinking based exercises just aren't practical because you have to give feedback on each one and then have the student do it again. That's assuming, of course, that the professor even knows how to teach in a manner other than give a lecture followed by a multiple choice test.

Also, ignore the existence of TAs. Very few of them are good enough teachers to guide a student through such exercises.

We are having a major debate about how crap our education system is, but at least we did considerably better than the US (and most European countries). So it could be worse I guess. But it's all going to hell in handbasket here too...

backslashbaby said:

I don't really think we're comparing apples to apples, though. The US only gave the test in English (!); included illegal immigrants, foreigners and other key categories of folks that other countries left out of the target population*; and our response rate was huge compared to many countries.

* Like institutionalized folks not being counted. A country's group-home or orphanage, etc. sort of structure could affect that very much. And then I don't get why some 'non-institutional special dwellings' were left out of some countries' targets (or even what that means. Projects? Halfway houses? ???).

"Exclusions from target population" pic
http://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media1480/234075-9schpc3h67/large/8.jpg

"Acheived response rates and population coverage" pic
http://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media1480/234075-9schpc3h67/large/12.jpg

The whole paper (chapters) I'm using as a source:
http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asse...the-quality-of-data_9789264204027-6-en#page17

eta: And I might get back to the Duke game instead of following up here if it looks like they have a chance of losing

eta2: Here is the language chart pic, too, for convenience:
http://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media1480/234075-9schpc3h67/large/9.jpg

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Considering the US explicitly excluded "hard to reach groups" like "(s)some Hispanic and black males" I would assume it excluded illegal immigrants too though, even if it is not explicitly stated. But yes, neither Finland nor Japan has a significant degree of immigrants (compared to most other countries on that list) which ought to give them higher scores (and yes, I hate being bested by Finland ).

Don't have much to add, but I'd push back against the idea that every generation thinks the world is changing too fast - for many, it's the other way around, that the world isn't changing fast enough for them and they see the previous ones as foot draggers.

Otherwise, there are a lot of posts I'd just ditto here, so I'll leave it there.

regdog said:

ETA: My problem isn't with all Millennials, just those who don't want to apply themselves or think beyond the world of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, who's trending on Twitter and the world beyond themselves.

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Twitter is for old people. Didn't you get the memo?

Honestly when people talk about this I think they're talking about fake people. Different people have different areas of expertise and different ways to wind down. If yours do not overlap with theirs, most of the times, you think less of them. Everyone has the capacity to be dumb and lazy and everyone can enjoy vapid entertainment of some sort. Individuals are smart but in groups, humans are just dumb, panicky animals. That's the way it's been for all time, really.

buzhidao said:

Omg totes magotes! At least I think totes magotes--your post is long so it's so hard to read lolz I can't even with literacyballz. You must have gotten, like, even bigger trophies than me! Dood I went in for a second degree a couple years ago and they expect me to convert kg to lbs and I was all, what even is this?? x 2.2? Is that a 22 with a dead bug in the middle or what? And then I got confused and scared because no one gave me a trophy for trying and I wasn't praised constantly for existing!!!11!!! I'm so over it. Whatev. I would go on Pinterest for cool trophy-for-existing ideas to give myself but I can't remember the thing you type in the magic white rectangle at the top of the computerbox.

Shit's hard. Yolo.

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That sounds soooper difficult, bruh. Why'd they make you do that? You should just get the degree without having to do that difficult stuff. I mean, you paid for it and it's not like it does anything, amirite? Just some expensive piece of paper? #notcool #gimmemyswagnow

StormChord said:

Amadan: I would love to listen to help from the older generation. Please! Heaven knows I could use it! I don't know what I'm doing, how should I? If there's useful advice to give, I'd love to hear it, but a blanket statement that we're all stupid and overconfident doesn't come close to helping! It just wears us down and makes us less and less trusting of the very people who can help us the most.

People are so quick to declare that we're a hopeless generation and to blame it on our new tech, but very few people are willing to try and help us. It's just too easy to write us all off.

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While I do belong to Generation Disappointment, I'm closer to Gen X than the actual millennium, so I have a little bit of life experience, what with jobs and taxes and a mortgage and things. People have never known what they were doing. From the beginning of time up until now, everybody's just making it up as they go along. Gen Xers, Baby Boomers, they were (are) just as worried about the future as us. Still, things are difficult for us. The world we've inherited is a mess. We all know things have to change, but who knows in what way and how to make it happen? It's frightening, it's unfair and it can be paralyzing.

However, it's our world now. We get to set the new rules. That scares the people before us, just as the people before them were scared of that generation. The world is changing away from what they know; the new generation likes different things from the things they like (although considering how immensely popular music from the 60's, 70's and 80's is nowadays...); they realize they're getting old and losing control. And to a generation of people with weird ideals who, naturally, aren't as great as they were. (Repeat ad nauseam.) Of course we could learn a lot from the elder generation, but if all they do is put you down they're not worth listening to.

Life's pretty frightening, but it can be done. We have uncertainty, but we also have possibilities. This is a world where you can make it in so many more ways than just working your way up the corporate ladder. We've seen random college students become billionaires by creating some piece of software in their spare time. This is a world where lofty dreams and ideals aren't completely unrealistic. That's weird and sounds like entitlement to the older generation who often had to buckle down and compromise, but they're the past. We're the future. We get to make it up as we go along now and we're going to do fine. Yeah, some of us are dumber than bricks, but that's always been true, they just have a much bigger platform now.

There's lots of good things about Millennials. We're just different. We're diverse, open-minded, passionate and dedicated about things we care about, like equality and justice, we look for meaning beyond money in our work and plenty of us are smart and technologically literate enough to make it. I mean, you go to U of C. The last thing you are is stupid.

There are problems in the education system, true. But I'll reiterate: it's just as much on the parents as it is one anyone else. Really, one can fairly blame the parents for the education system, as well...

robeiae said:

As to the blame here, for some of it Don is in the right ballpark, imo. The more the Federal government has involved itself in education, the worse the results have been.

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I heard a statistic a few years ago, the Federal Government provides something like (I forget the exact figures, but these are indicative) 5 percent of public school funding, and 70 percent of the rules and regulations. Of course, schools can't afford to lose the federal funding (i. e. states aren't willing to make up for the difference), so all public schools follow the federal regulations as well as local and state ones.

Beyond that, I think the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of parents. Too many parents across the last several decades have failed to provide the right kinds of incentives for their kids. Instead of raising kids who know life is something of a challenge, they've raised kids who essentially think everything should just fall in place.

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And it's an awful trick. It took me many years as an adult just to realize that I didn't win the parent lottery, and only after the awareness is it possible to work on fixing things.
But enough about me...

LittlePinto said:

...
I spent all semester hounding her about citing her work. For the final draft she gave me a section with citations. Not a single one matched up with our source numbers (or was even close) and there was some information "cited" that did not come out of any of our sources. Yes. She had just put random numbers after her sentences.

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That's just about unbelievable, that someone could go through effectively gaming the system rather than doing the work.

Also, ignore the existence of TAs. Very few of them are good enough teachers to guide a student through such exercises.

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I was visiting the computer cluster at Georgia Tech a while back (about 35 years ago) and overheard students saying good things about a particular professor, and complaining about how the system rewards profs for the wrong things - "he'll talk to you after class and make sure you understand the material - he keeps good office hours and spends a lot of time helping students out. Most all the other profs just give their lectures and spend all the rest of their time on research projects, writing papers and other things that move their career forward, rather than helping students learn."

All I know is, fewer and fewer young cashiers at grocery and drug stores and at restaurants can do simple math. If they have to do something that isn't simply running a bar code over a scanner, they're lost.

I've seen this phenomenon a few times, and it never fails to floor me. To give the most recent example, a couple of weeks ago I used a raincheck for organic chickens. It allowed me to buy up to 7 pounds of chicken at $1.99 a pound. I picked up two chickens, each approximately 3.5 pounds. The very young cashier was utterly flummoxed because she could not simply run the chickens over a scanner.

I'd already done the math in my head. It was 6.98 pounds of chicken. $1.99 a pound. So, $13.89. I understand not everyone is adept at mental math, but anyone should instantly see that we're talking approximately $14, right? About 7 pounds at about $2 a pound? And any adult could do the exact calculation with a pencil and paper, much less a calculator, right?

Wrong. The cashier didn't want to take my mental math (understandable, I guess). None of the cashiers near her knew what to do, either, so she rang for a manager. The manager (also very young), pulled out her phone, used the calculator function, and came up with $6 something for both chickens (not each -- for both).

I protested that this was obviously wrong, and showed them my calculations on a paper bag. Finally, they told me just to take the chickens at $6 and (essentially) shut up and go on with my day. Since the people behind me were getting annoyed, I complied.

I was a cashier when I was a young'n, and damn it, pretty much everyone I worked with could do simple math calculations. WTF happened? Are they not teaching simple math in school anymore?

I know this isn't every teen/young twenty something, but it's not an isolated incident, and damn it, barring a learning disability, it shouldn't be anyone.

Not knowing what to do when confronted with an item that can't be scanned sounds like a failure of training rather than a failure of math skills, but that's just me...

Then again as a math tutor it seemed to me that a significant number of your people are scared of numbers. I wonder who's scaring them?

Hapax Legomenon said:

Not knowing what to do when confronted with an item that can't be scanned sounds like a failure of training rather than a failure of math skills, but that's just me...

Then again as a math tutor it seemed to me that a significant number of your people are scared of numbers. I wonder who's scaring them?

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Certainly there was a failure of training, but it wasn't that the cashier didn't know how to put a price directly into the cash register. She did. What she didn't know how to do was figure out how much to charge for 6.98 pounds of chicken at $1.99 a pound. And her manager couldn't figure that out correctly even with a calculator.

benbradley said:

I was visiting the computer cluster at Georgia Tech a while back (about 35 years ago) and overheard students saying good things about a particular professor, and complaining about how the system rewards profs for the wrong things - "he'll talk to you after class and make sure you understand the material - he keeps good office hours and spends a lot of time helping students out. Most all the other profs just give their lectures and spend all the rest of their time on research projects, writing papers and other things that move their career forward, rather than helping students learn."

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I was so fortunate to do my undergrad work at a small liberal arts university where professors who could truly teach and wanted to help students learn were in the majority. They did research too, of course, but research wasn't their primary job.

The experience was flipped at the big university where I was in grad school. The majority of my profs were researchers first and teachers second. I had one prof say at the start of class, "If any of you have questions about the material then don't bring them to me and don't bother the TA with them." I had another who tried to turn a Tuesday/Thursday class into a Saturday class because of the number of conferences he wanted to attend.

Is it any wonder I didn't finish that program? Talk about a bad fit. The worst part for me is that the university glossed over those problems so I didn't know it was a bad fit until I was already there. I'm perfectly willing to accept responsibility for making sure I end up in a program that suits me but, come on guys, give me accurate information to work with!

I do feel for the profs. "Publish or perish" is a stressful way to live and many of them really were hired as researchers and then expected to teach. Everyone involved was set up to fail. It's one of the reasons why I think universities should separate their teaching and research arms. Put the researchers in the lab and the teachers in the classroom. Sometimes you have people who do both well but they are few and far between. (Yes, I know this would be an expensive endeavor.)

My first trip to a US supermarket I got a cashier who did not know what a bell pepper was even to look it up, and I only knew it as a capsicum.

Bur I have no idea how much is just being young and dumb, which is eternal.

Hapax Legomenon said:

Not knowing what to do when confronted with an item that can't be scanned sounds like a failure of training rather than a failure of math skills, but that's just me...

Then again as a math tutor it seemed to me that a significant number of your people are scared of numbers. I wonder who's scaring them?

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I made a brief remark on the militarisation of education. Referencing Williebee's article that he posted of course. Doesn't seem to garner much interest in debating that notion. *shrug*

Or perhaps the store is hiring the lowest of the crop, which means that minimum standards need not apply.

CassandraW said:

All I know is, fewer and fewer young cashiers at grocery and drug stores and at restaurants can do simple math. If they have to do something that isn't simply running a bar code over a scanner, they're lost.

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This story reminds me of another class I had at that same university. It was an upper level project management course and we were taking our midterm exam. I came to one question and it was simply a list of profits, expenses, and tax over a certain period of time with a certain monetary value as a starting point. The question was "How much money do you have at the end of the time period?"

Easy stuff, right? Just like balancing a checkbook.

While I worked I saw my classmates go up to the professor one-by-one and ask a question. Finally, he stopped us and said, "Problem number five is solved just like balancing a checkbook."

No one moved. Then, a voice from the back row said, "We don't use checkbooks."

The poor prof had to actually give a basic lesson on how checkbooks work right there.

As soon as class got out I dialed my grandmother and thanked her for insisting I learn to balance a checkbook when I was a pre-teen.

LP, i am taking accounting courses and if you said "balancing a chequebook", I would have to admit being clueless. But to say to me do a cash flow statement or a bank reconciliation, I would know what to do right there. The analogy of the chequebook may become a relic of the past.