And yet, there are over 1000 high schools in the U.S. that only graduate 60% or less of their students.
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My husband is a clinical psychologist working in an on-campus student health centre at a university of about 12,000 students. The counseling service there sees around 10% of the student population per year. I thought that rate was quite high. The service is free to access and I think itās great that 10% of the students are doing so. I donāt see this as an indication that millennials (of which I am one) are soft little babies that need to cry a lot. Rather, that they are realizing that mental health is not something to ignore. I hope more of them manage to get their shit together at this crucial young adult age then go on to have years of strife due to unaddressed mental health issues.
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And all you olds just want your Social Security checks handed to you along with your complimentary metamucil pills. Then you go out yelling about how when you were a kid you achieved impressive feats and chalk it up to personal superiority, when in fact you were no different than my generation is now. You just had the advantage of being born before wages had spent 30 years stagnating, and your economy hadnāt been scuttled by your parentsā generation.
/half sarc
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A good diet of seaweed and quinoa is better than metamucial.
/snarkface 
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People, millenials started being born in the eighties. There are a lot of us out there in the workforce right now for whom college is a distant memory. Iām a weird exception in that Iām attending university (I wish my fellow Americans would stop saying ācollegeā to refer to this) with a bunch of younger millenials. Iāve got news for you: Theyāre college kids. They tell the same dirty jokes, have pathetically naive views on how the world works, and get into poorly informed arguments all the time.
Nothing has changed. The only thing that bothers me about this current crop is a growing trend where people think less critically, and are less receptive to new information in general.
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Man I am sick of Gen Xers complaining about Millennials. You know who Boomers complained about when I was a kid? Gen Xers.
Itās called youth. Itās wasted on the young, and thereās nothing new about it.
Now get off my lawn.
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They let you eat quinoa at the oldfolks home? Thatās surprising. What if you choked on a husk? XD
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I only.have anecdata, at best. Twenty years ago you went to higher education not to get a job, but for education. Take that with the boulder of salt as needed.
I was talking to one of my founders about a new hire on a drive to grab some sushi. The new hire is a phd in quantum physics, and he had to take a course in the bay area to learn how to get a job.
He has a brain the size of Jupiter, and will make a stellar data scientist. And I feel the narrative of Millenials being privileged is a bit too narrow focused (which I think you also pointed out).
They just have (or are) learning differently.
@anon61221983 Iād love to hear your thoughts.
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Itās probably not all millennials, itās the privileged ones, and then probably not all of them. The ones Iāve taught tend to be more grounded and practicalā¦
the guy youāre talking about seems more like a super-smart dude with no practical skills.
The shift from āeducation to job trainingā is based on the need to show a profit from a public university, more than anything else. The last real āivory towersā are the elite institutions, I think.
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Haha, a few months ago my partner & I had a convo about these generational labels.
We didnāt know at all what we were and since neither of us cared to reference anything we just talked about it a bit without resolution.
We know we arenāt boomers because thatās what our parents are, but we had no idea if we were Generation Xerās, Millennials or what have you.
I recalled hearing talk of Generation Y some years back but didnāt know who that would be or perhaps that these Millennials were supposed to be Generation Zed(ers) but where the fuck would we go from there? Or maybe Millennials were Generation Y rebranded, because an arbitrary calendar or to head off the marketing dilemma of what to DO after Generation Zedā¦ does time end?
Our convo ended on the same note it began on, we didnāt know or care.
Huzzah for not paying attention!
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Yeah, one of those āno practical skillsā to āyou built an agricultural society with a working economic model?ā Kind of peeps. :). Makes me a touch jelly.
But in general if you exclude for-profit universities, and universities that train as vocational schools, is it really any different from 1800?
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<img src=ā//cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/original/3X/f/3/f34081c774b76b3b58d6fa4f32b443fa00c97fc7.gifā width=ā500ā height=ā276ā
Must have been nice. I really donāt need to hear another lecture from another 50 year old tenured professor about āthe real worldā of employment. Thankfully, I donāt get those as much now that Iāve exhausted all my 100s and 200s. I was amazed at how some incredibly smart people could sound so incredibly naive.
There is literally nothing about the practice of finding a job (or hiring) that isnāt based on folklore. (Unless you work for Google, where their guy in HR wrote a book on why pretty much everything you know about hiring and employment selection isnāt based on any kind of data.) Job retention is not directly correlated to competence, and anyone who has ever worked a full time job knows this. Yet people will polish their resumes endlessly, as if a comma splice or insufficiently market-friendly wording will be the kiss of death. The fact is that you are competing for too few jobs and your resume isnāt even getting more than skimmed, sometimes by machines. Donāt waste your time, and donāt waste your money being trained in the art that is the bullshit of the job search. Youāre much better off investing that time in knowing your field.
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Usually by machines, at least twice, then handed over to an HR person who has no idea how to tell who actually is qualified and who isnāt, since theyāve been working in HR most of their careers, instead of the job theyāre hiring for.
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In my experience you are absolutely right. Remember, Iām the music dropout who became a hacker that sits at VC meets. Even when I get my stupid ass fired 
I am curious about what academics think, especially now (god especially now) about how they view us, the pleebs, and working with them.
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From what Iāve read, itās actually management that short-staffs HR (they donāt directly make profit, so directing resources their way is avoided) and then subject matter experts who do ultimately pull the trigger after interviewing you base their decision on literally their first impression on seeing you. This is why Google, in their data-driven approach, does not have the interviewer make any decisions about hiring. They also have tried hiring people that didnāt get the job, as a sort of trial to see if they were losing good applicants. To their surprise (and to my utter opposite of surprise) the candidates proved perfectly qualified. When I read that I just laughed and thought of all the jobs Iād ever applied to where I wasnāt hired, knowing full well that I was perfectly qualified. (Iām pretty sure I can work at Target- I donāt think the interviewer got someone substantially better.)
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Well, yeah, the university is completely different from 1800! For one, we have like a ton more academic disciplines. Who goes to university is completely opened up, especially in the past 60 years or so. And people really do view a college degree as an economic ladder up and they look to careers that will have a pay off once they have a BA. This isnāt a judgement on them, at all, but just reality, I think. I rarely get history, philosophy, or english majors in my classes (in 3 and a half years of teaching, Iāve had maybe a dozen of those in total, if that), but tons of CS, nursing and related fields, education, business, etc.
So yeah, itās changed tons.
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I am most of the way there with you.
The question, as framed, is a rant (bogus!?) about Millenials. I canāt find any reason they wonāt be more productive or efficient than us farts. And while I object to many changes in educationā¦ It still feels like a rising ocean.
As in a rising sea lifts all boats. Yep, ever the optimist
Dude, Iām in academia and I kind of am still a pleeb. A GSU diploma isnāt going to go to those precious places where I get to sit around and think big thoughts all day. Itās going to either a job teaching a 5/5 load, where if Iām lucky, I get to crank out some journal articles and maybe publish my dissertation into a book, or I can find another related field (archival work? museum? government stuff? etc). There are the yale guys, who are filling up the tenure track jobs with 2/2 or 3/3 load and the rest of us.
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