Surprise! Surprise! Survey finds college graduates are not emotionally ready to enter the workforce

 Before the French signed an armistice with Germany in 1940, France and England were allies against Hitler. One of their first major joint ventures was a plan to invade Norway and deprive Germany of the iron ore that the Nazis needed to wage war.

British, French, Norwegian, and Polish forces attacked German troops at Narvik, the leading Norwegian port for exporting iron ore. Ten times larger than the Germans' defending force, it took the allies a long time to dislodge the Nazis. Then France and Great Britain threw their victory away by abandoning Norway to send troops to deal with the Wehrmacht onslaught in France.

British General Claude Auchinleck, reflecting on the Norwegian campaign, expressed disappointment with his country's army. "By comparison with the French, or the Germans for that matter, our men for the most part[,] seemed distressingly young, not so much in years as in self reliance and manliness generally."  In other words, in the spring of 1940, the British army wasn't up to the dirty job of defeating the Nazis.

Something similar is happening with American college graduates. A recent survey of recent college graduates by the Mary Christie Institute concluded that many recent college graduates aren't emotionally prepared for the world of work.

"Our findings found that once in the workplace, young people continue to struggle mentally and emotionally," MCI reported.  Overall, more than half the respondents reported mental health problems, with women reporting more mental health issues than men (p. 4).

Disturbingly, almost 40 percent "of respondents said their college did not help them develop skills to prepare them for the emotional or behavioral impact of the transition to the workplace" (p.  5).

Over half the respondents said they experienced burnout at least once a week (p. 4). Not surprisingly, graduates with heavy financial obligations reported more anxiety than their peers who were not excessively burdened by debt.

The MCI authors pointed out that the COVID pandemic probably contributed to the stress and anxiety young college graduates are facing. And I'm sure that's true.

Nevertheless, the MCI report highlights the fact that colleges need to do more to prepare their graduates to be confident and successful workers. Unfortunately, I believe colleges are contributing to their graduates' anxieties by placing them in an artificial environment that is very different from the corporate workplace.

First, grade inflation is rampant throughout higher education, which means that students are getting good grades without doing much work. Many perceive their stellar report cards as participation trophies--they get a good grade if they just show up for class. That attitude often transfers to the workplace, where college graduates' perception of work conflicts with employers' expectation that their professional workers do their best to excel.

Second, students who graduate from college without trying hard may believe their bachelor's degrees prove that they are more intelligent than most people.  In fact, someone who graduates with a high GPA from a humanities program at a mediocre college often doesn't know anything that would be useful on the job.

Finally, colleges that cause their students to take on heavy student-loan burdens are increasing their graduates' anxiety when their student loans stop, and they have to pay their rent and monthly student-loan payments.

Bummer!

What happens to young people who go to college without basic reading and writing skills? It's not good

  The Baton Rouge Advocate published an editorial a few days ago titled "Get ahead in colleges like LSU, without all the hard work." 

The editorial quoted Benjamin Haines, a graduate student at Louisiana State University, who has discovered that many LSU students arrive on campus without the basic skills they should have learned in high school.

"In my anecdotal experience as a teaching assistant at LSU," Haines wrote, "many young college students aren't equipped with the requisite writing or literary tools necessary to produce passable writing, a product of a failing secondary education system, rather than an indication of students' abilities. 

Haines continued with this condemnation:

Especially here in Louisiana, professors, instructors, and teaching assistants fight a daily uphill battle against a decrepit secondary educational system in which students are failing to receive the necessary literary skills to excel at the next level of learning, and business-minded university administrators that accept students who aren't genuinely qualified into their rolls.

As a professor who spent twenty-five years in public universities, I can attest that Haines' rebuke of secondary education is on the mark--at least here in Louisiana. Many students graduate high school without a basic understanding of grammar and punctuation and no clear idea about constructing a paragraph, much less a well-reasoned analytical or research paper.

And Haines is right to blame university administrators for admitting students unprepared to do college work. University leaders are desperate for tuition dollars and are willing to foist clueless young people off on hapless professors and instructors who are faced with three choices:

1) They can flunk unprepared students. Students whose GPAs plummet will eventually be expelled on academic grounds.

2) Professors can turn their university courses into remedial classes, which will require them to teach students basic literary skills they should have learned in the sixth grade.

3) They can indulge in grade inflation and give every student a passing grade. I fear that this is the option most college instructors are taking.

What happens to the unprepared students who go to college? Some become discouraged and drop out. Others will soldier on, drifting into soft majors with low academic standards. Often these misfits stretch out their four-year degree programs to five, six, or even seven years.

With grade inflation and declining academic standards, many unprepared students will eventually obtain college degrees without learning anything useful.

What will they do then? They will stumble into the adult world of work with a mountain of student debt and no practical job skills.

But not to worry. People who get worthless college degrees can always go on to graduate school.

105 Organizations Want Biden to Cancel All Student Loan Debt: It Ain't Happenin'

 More than one hundred public interest groups sent a letter to President Biden this week urging him to cancel all student debt. How much are we talking about? Close to $2 trillion.

I will say upfront that I support wholesale student-loan forgiveness. As numerous studies have pointed out, burdensome student debt has kept millions of Americans from buying homes, having children, and saving for retirement. 

If the President were to cancel all student debt, 45 million college-loan borrowers could pour approximately $5 billion a month back into the economy.  That would be good for everybody.

Nevertheless, I don't think President Biden will wipe out $2 trillion in student debt. As Betsy DeVos, President Trump's Education Secretary, pointed out in a 2018 speech, student loans make up one-third of all federal assets. 

What will be the consequences if the federal government removes one-third of its assets from the national balance sheet?  I don't think anyone knows.

Also, the President surely realizes that forgiving all student debt undermines the integrity of the federal student-loan program.  If all student loans are forgiven this year, how can the Department of Education expect to collect on the student loans it makes in the future?

Moreover, I don't see the wisdom of wiping out $2 billion in student debt unless American higher education is fundamentally reformed. Tuition rates have reached an insane level--$25 thousand per semester at most private colleges. Colleges are cranking out worthless degrees in the liberal arts and social sciences, not to mention vapid graduate degrees in law and business.

And we have far too many colleges. Does it make sense to grant wholesale student-loan forgiveness while the government continues propping up the for-profit college industry and small schools that are losing enrollment and teetering on closure?

I think everyone who calls for massive student-loan forgiveness is sincere. I believe our President and most members of Congress really want to grant relief to millions of Americans who are saddled with unmanageable debt levels.

But when we look closely at the federal student loan program, we see what a monster it has become. We can't fix the loan program without fixing higher education on a massive scale.  And no one has a clue how we can do that.

"If I knew then what I know now, I probably would have skipped college": Freshman enrollment is down 13 percent at 4-year schools

Freshman enrollment dropped an astonishing 13 percent last year, and overall college enrollment sank 4 percent. 

What accounts for this exodus? The COVID pandemic partly explains it. Colleges switched from classroom teaching to online instruction in the spring of 2020, which was decidedly inferior. Undoubtedly, many students have decided not to go back to college until the professors resume teaching face-to-face.

But COVID is only a partial explanation for the student-enrollment downturn.  Cost is a huge factor. It now costs about $75,000 a year (including room and board) to attend a private liberal arts college--$300,000 to get a four-year degree.

Private schools have slashed freshman tuition by more than 50 percent to lure new students through the door, and almost all first-year private-college students now get some sort of discount.  

But for most schools, that strategy has not been successful. Enrollments continue to drop.

But there is a third factor that helps explain plummeting college enrollment.  Students have figured out that a four-year college degree is no guarantee of a good job--particularly a degree in liberal arts or the social sciences.

Many employers no longer require new employees to have a college degree, including Apple, Google, IBM, and Bank of America. Young people have discovered that a vocational-school certificate may lead to a better job than a four-year degree in gender studies.

For example, CNBC carried a story about a young person who left college to enroll in a 14-week coding boot camp, "If I knew then what I know now," the former college student explained, "I probably would have skipped college."

As a guy who spent 25 years as a college professor in the higher-education gulag, I'm glad to see college enrollment declining.  Too many students ruin their lives by taking out student loans to get vacuous college degrees from institutions that don't teach students to think or solve problems. 

Colleges have hired market firms and "enrollment management" administrators to attract warm bodies back into the classroom. But young people are beginning to wise up. Small liberal arts colleges, in particular, are struggling to survive as their student enrollment shrinks.

More and more young Americans have come to realize they can have a good life without going to college. Unfortunately, some college students don't figure that out until they have destroyed their financial future by taking out too many college loans.

LSU students in a crowded classroom: Ain't we got fun!

Happy New Year! Your middle-class status has been revoked and a college degree will not get you reinstated

 As 2020 comes to a close, you may think 2021 will be a better year. And if you are among the nation's wealthiest Americans, things look pretty rosy.

But if you are a middle-class person, next year will be worse for you than 2020.

First of all, as Charles Hugh Smith pointed out in a recent online essay, the middle class is an illusion. If you think you are in the middle class, you have been deceived. In fact, you are in a "phantom middle class," a class of permanent debtors.  

Over the past 40 years, earnings for the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans has grown 15 times faster than income for the bottom 90 percent.  Wages as a share of the national economy have been going down for the last half-century. 

You know that because you saw how wages went up for your parents' generation, but are not going up for working people today. 

Or as Mr. Smith put it: 

If the top 10% own 90% of the wealth and has captured virtually all the income gains of the past 20 years, then isn't it obvious America has no middle class? What the traditional middle middle class . . . owns is debt . . . .

Nowhere is this more obvious than when we look at the massive debt that gullible Americans have taken on to get a college degree in the pathetic hope that a diploma would get them into the middle class or keep them from falling out of it.

As Mr. Smith pointed out, Americans are burdened by "$I.7 trillion in student loan debt burdening those who bought the narrative that a college diploma was a passport to the security of the middle class. The debt load carried by those clinging on to aspirations of middle-class security is staggering."

Indeed, "burdening powerless students with uncertain futures with trillions in high-interest debt would have been viewed as criminal two generations ago, but now it's celebrated by those reaping interest from precarious debt-serfs."

The poor saps who have been plunged into poverty by their student loans cannot discharge their debt in bankruptcy courts, and they got nothing but crumbs from Congress's so-called coronavirus relief legislation.

College presidents--most of whom make more than half-million dollars a year, whined to their legislators about how much the pandemic was costing them, and Congress bailed them out. But did even one of these charlatan bozos urge some relief for their ex-students who are groaning under the burden of student loans they can never repay? No, they did not.

If Americans graduated from colleges and graduate schools with useful skills, they would earn enough to pay off their student loans quickly--within 10 years at least. But they are not acquiring practical skills--especially if they majored in the liberal arts or the social sciences.  

Again, Mr. Smith:

As for possessing skills, much of the workforce has few producer skills, as the consumer economy devotes inordinate attention not to producing but to marketing, speculation and complying with counterproductive regulations and bureaucratic file-shuffling.

But our fun-house economy cannot continue indefinitely with the superwealthy exploiting the rest of us while the government prints money and runs up the national debt--now pushing $28 trillion. As Smith observed:

Once the con of printing trillions of dollars out of thin air dissolves and the nation has to balance its books in the real world, these file-shuffling and speculative skills will no longer generate meaningful income.

Those of us in the bottom 90 percent of the nation's earners can do very little to stop the downward spiral in our wealth and income.  But at least we can advise our children not to take out student loans to get worthless college degrees, useless MBAs, obscenely expensive law diplomas, and meaningless doctorates.

Does Harvard President Larry Bacow have anything to say about student debt?