"Unprepared and Entitled:" Hiring Managers Aren't Impressed by the Products of American University Education

Our best and brightest don't know how to read, write, think, talk, or work.

Let's pay another ten trillion to our "universities."

A recent survey from Intelligent found that "1 in 4 hiring managers say recent grads are unprepared for the workforce" and "1 in 8 managers [are] planning to avoid hiring them in 2025."

The main reasons for this are lack of preparation, a so-so work ethic, and a sense of entitlement among the grads, according to the survey.

"24% of hiring managers believe recent college graduates are unprepared for the workforce, while 33% cite a lack of work ethic, and 29% view them as entitled," the survey found.

"Additionally, 27% feel recent graduates are easily offended, and 25% say they don't respond well to feedback."

That last part is a killer. It's also why DEI hires/promotions are usually a disaster. Everyone infected with woke is also infected by the comorbidity of believing that all criticism/direction from your boss is a racial or sexual aggression, and that you're perfect the way you are, and that anyone who attempts to instruct you to do the job the right way is a racist who doesn't understand your Different Ways of Knowing.

It's an evil and destructive doctrine -- it's a guarantee against any self-improvement at any point in your future. It's a talisman that protects you from excellence and achievement.

And they've all got it.

The survey results appear to mirror a trend found in recent headlines. A "2025 college graduate job market" search conducted by The College Fix produced the following headlines:

"Class of 2025 College Grads Face Uncertain Job Market"

"Job Market is Getting Tougher for College Graduates"

"New Grads Struggling to Find Work in Job Market

"No Hire, No Fire: The Worst Market for Grads in Years"

...

He suggested grads tout their "skills and talent, not just a GPA" to "share what [they] are doing to continuously make [themselves] better."

Maybe they have to show something other than GPA because all employers now know that colleges give everyone, even people who don't ever come to class, A's and B's with a skew towards the A's.

Maybe students aren't alone in failure.

On Sunday, the National Education Association -- which represents over 3 million teachers and school personnel -- passed a resolution at its annual conference pledging to combat what it labeled "Trump's embrace of fascism." The problem? The resolution repeatedly spelled the word "fascism" as "facism."

The resolution read in part: "NEA pledges to defend democracy against Trump's embrace of facism [sic] by using the term facism [sic] in NEA materials to correctly characterize Donald Trump's program and actions." It went on to claim that opposing Trump was essential for "the survival of civilization itself" and demanded additional staff and funding -- to the tune of $3,500 -- to carry out the initiative.

The misspelling, however, quickly overshadowed the message.

Corey A. DeAngelis, a conservative education expert, blasted the NEA in an X post and follow-up opinion piece. "Yes, the union that claims to represent educators couldn't even spell 'fascism' correctly in its official resolution attacking the president," he wrote. "The irony is almost too rich to parody."

Back in November 2024, the Atlantic posted an article: "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books."

The word "elite" seems wildly misplaced in that sentence.

The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college--even at highly selective, elite colleges--prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

"My jaw dropped," Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It's not that they don't want to do the reading. It's that they don't know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

...

Twenty years ago, Dames's classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It's not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who "read insightfully and easily and write beautifully," he said, "but they are now more exceptions." Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students "shutting down" when confronted with ideas they don't understand; they're less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown's English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework--then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. "It's changed expectations about what's worthy of attention," Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. "Being bored has become unnatural." Reading books, even for pleasure, can't compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn't read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

This UConn student is completely illiterate, by her own admission.

This teacher says that illiteracy begins in high school.

posted by Ace at 01:20 PM

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