Not ready for college or a career

A double in recent weeks for those under thirty.

First, an August survey by Intelligent.com found that employers really aren’t excited about Gen Z. 75% of companies surveyed found their new Gen Z hires unsatisfactory. Six in ten people had fired a recent college graduate they had just hired.

What’s the problem? Lack of motivation, lack of professionalism, poor organizational skills, and poor communication skills top the list. Or as Huy Nguyen, Chief Education and Career Development Advisor at Intelligent, puts it:

Many recent college graduates may struggle to enter the job market for the first time, as it can be a huge contrast to what they are used to throughout their educational journey. They are often unprepared for a less structured environment, the cultural dynamics of the workplace, and the expectation of independent work. Even if they have theoretical knowledge from college, they often lack the practical real-world experience and soft skills needed to succeed in the work environment.

Meanwhile, an article by Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic circulated on the Internet to sound the alarm: students are arriving at college without having read an entire book. This comes as no surprise to K-12 teachers, who have been ringing this bell for years.

There could be many explanations, but it’s hard not to notice that Generation Z is the first to grow up fully educated under waves of modern educational reforms: No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top and the Big. Standardized testing. These are students who have had an education focused on test scores that have been used repeatedly as a measure of student achievement and school effectiveness.

By 2011, research was already showing that high-stakes testing narrowed the curriculum. From recess to science class, if it wasn’t for the Big Standardized Test, it wasn’t a priority.

Reading instruction focused on skills rather than content (an approach widely criticized as ineffective), and in the classroom this meant that teachers were pressured to abandon full-length books (too long and time-consuming) in favor of exercise books containing short extracts followed by handfuls of multiple choice questions (best preparation for the Grand Standardized Test format).

The very format of these tests (and their practice) promotes the idea that for every question there is a right answer, and the student’s task is to understand what the test writers think about that answer. Independent exploration and individual ideas are not part of the program. Open discussion gave way to highly structured drills and exercises. Texts shouldn’t be long or complex or require days to chew, but short enough to spit out answers in seconds.

It would not be surprising if students were less likely to develop autonomy and independence than previous generations.

The great irony here is that the Common Core State Standards, which characterized and codified this approach, and which effectiveness tests like PARCC and SBA were intended to measure, promised to prepare students for college and to the career. In fact, once “Common Core” became a politically toxic term, “college and career ready” became the preferred descriptor for this skills-based, test-centric approach.

Over the past two decades, the trend has been to treat students as objects to be designed to produce better math and reading outcomes. Teachers have exhausted themselves swimming against the tide (although younger teachers have also evolved thanks to this new version of education).

We can point to other possible culprits, from the rise of cell phones and social media to the pandemic to the publication of sensational articles that unfairly characterize an entire generation. Despite this, political leaders, politicians, and technocrats have promised that if we listen to them, the next generation will be better prepared for college and careers than any generation before them. This promise does not appear to have materialized.