What follows is an outline of a conversation I have had repeatedly throughout my academic career. It is a representation of no individual or institution in particular, as I have had it with people at all stages of their career and at all types of post-secondary institutions from community colleges up to major research universities.
As a preface, everybody must know that educators spend a tremendous amount of time complaining about the students. I imagine doctors and nurses complain about their patients, and that people in retail and service complain about customers. Well, I can promise you that teachers are no different. If you know any teachers, you probably know this firsthand. If not, well…your suspicions are true. We complain.
Some colleague will spend a variable amount of time – years on end, or a single conversation – complaining about some aspect of his/her students. Usually it is their complete lack of effort or their utter lack of preparation / skills necessary to succeed in a university environment. My experiences have led me to believe what they tell me without being terribly skeptical. At some point I will ask a question like, "So did you end up failing a lot of people? Was that an issue?" or "What did your grade distribution look like?" Since I do not record these conversations and keep them as evidence you will have to take my word for this part, but I'd estimate that about 75% of the time my fellow educator reports that the grades were all A or B. Maybe, if he or she is a real ball-breaker, they give grades all the way down to C.
This is not universally true. Sometimes other professors tell me they fail a lot, or they pride themselves on being a tough grader who does not simply hand out A's like candy. There are some of us out there. But take a look at the statistics on grade inflation. Not only is A the modal grade in college courses now but the average GPA at any campus in the country has increased steadily since the 1990s. Maybe the students are just getting smarter. I kid, I kid.
I don't understand how people who have a Ph.D., not to mention considerable college teaching experience, cannot put two and two together. The students are terrible, yet somehow giving them all passing grades (and in some cases B or higher) isn't making them less terrible. Shocking, isn't it? It's almost as if the students can glean information online or from the campus grapevine about which faculty members are creampuff graders and take their classes with the confidence that if they don't feel like putting in the effort necessary to get an A they can do absolutely nothing and walk out with the B. Someone should do some research to study the question of how hard people will work above and beyond what is necessary to accomplish a well-defined goal.
That leaves the question: Why? Why do some faculty do this?
We don't lack for theories. Some people believe that giving high grades buys positive teaching evaluations, while others insist that no such relationship exists. Others argue that faculty, particularly at smaller and more teaching-intensive schools, grow to like their students to the point that they will not grade them harshly.
Others blame parents and administrators for emphasizing grades above learning and retention above quality, respectively. Students who fail out of school don't write tuition checks, after all.
I have a simpler theory: laziness.
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It's rare that I don't side with academics, for obvious reasons. But I really think this one is largely our fault. Faculty give out inflated grades because it's easier. It's easier than working hard to improve a student's performance when said student simply does not care, and it's easier than giving out D and F grades and having to deal with students complaining about their grades and trying to negotiate higher ones. That's really all there is to it. Passing the students along, as America's high schools figured out long ago, is the easiest way to avoid making their problems your own. Just give them a C so they won't take your class again, or a B so you won't have to watch them cry in your office about how dad is going to take the SUV away.
Ironically, the perception of how much work is involved with giving out real, uninflated grades is…inflated. Being a Dick Grader is not nearly as much work as most faculty seem to think. If you lay out clear expectations and let the students know up front that you're not going to tolerate negotiations and that anyone looking for a course that can be passed with no effort should look elsewhere, it turns out that you don't have to spend hours and hours at the end of the semester in pained negotiations with aggrieved students.
It is not our job to hand out an A to anyone who enrolls in the course.
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When we choose to do so, however, we shouldn't be surprised that the students adjust their approach to our courses accordingly. If I could get my paycheck without having to put any effort into the job you can be certain that I would. Why would the students, grade-oriented as our system has become, do any differently?
HoosierPoli says:
The problem with grade inflation is that, much like regular inflation, one person can't fight it, because the value of the currency is set by the expectations of society as a whole. Much like I cannot go to the store and fight inflation by demanding they sell me goods for less than the price, a professor can't roll back grade inflation by pretending we're in 1976 again.
Cs are the new Fs, Bs are the new Cs, and As are the new Bs. That's a fact that's not lost on the vast majority of participants in the education market, and we mark our evaluations of GPAs to market.
The problem, if there is one, is the inaction of the grade system as a whole to adjust to the boom in the A supply by printing higher demominations. Yes, I'm suggesting a grade above A. AA would be the obvious candidate. I suggest we phase it in at the lower levels of schooling, where grade inflation has already taken hold to a much greater degree (you see AP classes being given 5 grade points instead of 4 already). Once students get used to it, we can phase it in at the college level. Students can still get their As, but now As will be worth numerically what they already mean socially – good but certainly not perfect.
HoosierPoli says:
'demominations'
If there were ever a time for an edit button, this is it.
Steve from Canada says:
Thanks for writing this. It's hard to know what to do. The only students I've ever failed have been those who cheated in ways they couldn't convincingly deny. Moreover, most of the students in this category have nonetheless tried to insist that the word-for-word correspondence between sentences in their papers and sentences in written works on the web is entirely coincidental and that I am the asshole.
wetcasements says:
Some thoughts:
1) I teach English at a small-ish college in South Korea. A few years back word came down from the education office that, due to grade inflation, we'd all be grading on a curve from now on. Kind of heavy-handed, but overnight the supposed problem was solved. (And our curve is actually pretty generous, all things considered.) Of course, you can pull that off in a smaller, centralized country like SK.
2) I had a professor in college who straight up gave everybody A's if they completed their papers and took the final. I forgot how it came about, but a fellow professor called him on it and his answer was basically look, these kids and their parents are paying a shit-ton of money (expensive midwest librul arts college — Go Lords and Ladies!) so who am I to fuck them over if they end up wanting to apply to graduate school, and MBA program, etc. Also, this was the 90's. Tuition has gone up about 20K to 50K a year since then.
I mean, at the time as a pretty nerdy, hard-working student, I was shocked and — gasp! — offended. But as I get older I kind of see his point. It sucks that higher education has basically become a consumer exchange of goods and services, but in an age where people with four-year degrees are fighting it out for barista spots at Starbuck's, well, why not just pass the buck?
3) Ed, would love to hear your thoughts on the recent l'affaire de Mark Baurlein. In relation to 2, you can be nostalgic for some former "golden era" when professors were taken seriously and emulated by hard-working students, but that's also kind of bullshit. Campuses used to be far more sexist and racist, and far more (white) (male) professors used to bang their undergrads with few consequences. In longing for a pre-inflation era, which I sort of do, I have to acknowledge that there were myriad layers of often worse bullshit going on in the past.
I mean, giving a kid an A for just showing up sucks but, so do outrageous tuitions, going into ridiculous debt for a B.A. that you _need_ for a decent job but certainly doesn't _guarantee_ you one ca. 2015, and the current university management class (deans, provosts, etc.) who frankly don't seem to give a shit about the job prospects of their actual graduates.
tl;dr — shit is fucked up and bullshit, but looking at the big picture of academia grade inflation is really one of the smaller issues going on here. You sound look a really good, dedicated teacher. Worry about how in ten years or so you'll only be allowed to teach from texts approved by the Heartland Institute and/or President Ted Cruz.
Dave Dell says:
My micro econ professor called a 4 year degree a 'union card'. That was the mid 70's when the G I Bill would keep you in school (if you worked part time and full time in summer) at a land grant university.
Now a 4 year degree is the equivalent of my father's high school diploma and similarly to High School today the desire in higher education is to get the student through to graduation.
My sense is that today that 4 year degree is no longer a 'union card' unless you're graduating in certain engineering/tech fields and even there a masters is better.
Hobbes says:
It's definitely easier for me to be the "dick grader" because everything on my tests is objective – either you got it right and you get the points or you didn't and you don't – and programming assignments work or don't. I'm actually a "pretty nice grader" because if I just stuck with the generally-assumed university grade cutoffs for percent of points earned I'd be failing like 20% of my class.
So I acknowledge that it's difficult material and curve the class a little. But I give Fs. I have 92 students and I'll probably be giving 5 Fs and 6-8 Ds depending on how the final goes. It's easy to give that out for the people who just stopped showing up; it's a lot more difficult for the people who actually put in the time and effort all semester and simply Don't Get It.
mayya says:
I think it can be easily explained by the same phenomenon present in employee evaluations. When I have to do yearly performance appraisals on my staff, I'm always told to be moderate, because only really, truly, super exceptional, congressional medal of honor type employees should receive "consistently exceeds expectations" rankings. We're told that the equivalent of a "C" ranking represents a very good employee indeed, and that our appraisals should follow a bell curve (!!).
But when it comes time to do the appraisals, all the managers give their staff rankings of the B+ to A- level. Because if you don't, it looks like you think your staff sucks. And if your staff sucks, it's because you're a lousy manager.
Bad grades = bad teacher.
Hazy Davy says:
You didn't mention the reason I suspected. I suspected that grade inflation was institutional…it wasn't a matter of an individual professor's desires or laziness, but rather the school administration influencing professors, in the hope of:
– Better alumni fundraising (due to happier alumni)
– Better acceptance rate into graduate school
The rumor at my undergraduate institution was that medical schools maintained a multiplier schedule by school, which they'd apply to the GPA of applicants, before comparison. (Of course, it was claimed that we had the highest, or one of the highest multipliers.)
So now I'm curious—have you never received such pressure?
['cause I truly worked hard for my 3.0, which appears to have been average at the time, and it definitely handicapped me when job hunting, as some folks didn't appreciate our brand as much.]
Anonymous Prof says:
I'm sorry, but the administration is a big part of the problem here.
I've just been to a meeting with my dean and dept. chair at which I was told that copying homework was no longer to be considered cheating. I had caught nearly half my class- I mean customers- copying homework, you see. So the dean just threw out all the reports I filed, refused to prosecute, and told me not to do it again. (Last semester, when I caught two students copying homework, he prosecuted. One of them was even given an automatic F in the class. But when half the customers do it, that means it's not cheating anymore.)
I'm wondering how long it will be before copying the answers on takehome exams is no longer to be considered cheating. Based on past experience, at least 1/3 of the class will cheat on a takehome exam, which is why I don't give them anymore.
So do I give out a lot of A's? Yeah, I do. Fuck it. Not my problem anymore. At least they actually allow me to *teach*, even if I'm not really allowed to *grade.* But they're chipping away at that, too. They're starting to micromanage my course content and tell me what I am and am not allowed to say when I teach science.
Davis X. Machina says:
No unhappy customers. It's the goal of every retail business.
AL says:
My own experience confirms basically everything that Ed has written here. I teach master's degree students in a social science. Many of my colleagues and I routinely complain about the lack of effort from our students. Well, the grade distribution in our courses is publicly available for students to see, and one colleague who is a frequent complainer gave 17 A grades in a class of 18 students last semester!
c u n d gulag says:
And when these young people come out to work in the real world, they're shocked that they can't come in late, or not come in at all and not do what's expected of them.
I was an Adjunct for almost 7 years before I went back to being a Customer Service Training Manager.
I got these young people,
And they'd been passed up the chain since Kindergarten.
Then, they hit the real world, and its expectations.
And, some don't know how to react, or how to work hard.
Hell, no one expected them to work hard for almost 2 decades. And so, they think every boss is a demanding asshole.
Yes.
They are.
They want to keep THEIR jobs! And THEIR jobs depend on YOU, you precious little snowflake!
So, buck up.
Nose, meet grindstone!!!!
Tom says:
The one class where I would argue grade inflation doesn't happen is in a math class.
Other than that, yeah. I blame both faculty-course evaluations (which is why I ignore the results of these surveys) and to a lesser extent, laziness.
Stelter says:
As a recent grad I had quite a few teacher with the "you're not Jesus" mentality. My transcript is a sea of 89% and 90%. Good on those teachers for making a true A reserved for the truly gifted of us. But it hurts to see 70% of the Summa Cum Laude crowd consisting of elementary education or communication majors.
democommie says:
"I imagine doctors and nurses complain about their patients, and that people in retail and service complain about customers."
I complain about all of the people who don't eat ALL their food when I perform my chef de plongeur duties at a local function hall.
I was out with Buddy the Wonderdog on his routine NSA* patrol, earlier this morning, when I ran into a guy I know who teaches history at our local SUNY campus. We and the dogs exchanged greetings (no, I don't do buttsniffs!) and I said, "So, you're doing final exams? I guess you'll find out if you imparted any wisdom.". That gave him a chuckle.
* Neighborhood Smell Association
Skippper says:
You really need to take a step back and look at the big picture.
1. A dimwit like Ronnie Reagan can get two terms in office, and many people think he was brilliant and the bestest president ever.
2. 59,000,000 Americans thought a semi-literate, poorly-educated grifter from Alaska was vice presidential, if not presidential, material.
3. Congress is chockablock full of people who couldn't form a complete thought if you gave them a dollar.
4. A CEO can take a once-thriving company into the toilet, get a $10 million bonus, and then get a new job as CEO at another company within weeks.
5. Bankers can collapse the economy through greed and idiocy and be so loaded down with bonus money they can't spend it fast enough.
Grade inflation at our colleges (i.e. trade schools) is the logical outcome of that.
anadromy says:
In grad school, I TA'd for a film professor at a large state school. The quality of the essays I had to grade was shockingly bad (like grade school level, some even written in pencil, etc.) but the prof wouldn't let me give anything less than a B. She said many of the kids were the first in their families to go to college and shouldn't be graded too harshly for fear of discouraging them.
It was a drag.
Steve in the ATL says:
Regarding your FB post, I have two kids in college. Last week, during both of their exams, their grandfather actually died and we had a Thursday viewing (creepy, I know, but it's the South) and Friday funeral. So in at least two cases this year, the students weren't lying!
One of the kids had to give her professor a note from the funeral director that she was in attendance. I suggested a selfie with the corpse, but no one found that humorous.
swkellogg says:
How could one expect substantive student investment in something as "tedious" as education from a culture that increasingly sees "meaningful" achievement in the lives of the Kardashians and similarly well-heeled do-nothings?
http://www.cdmc.ucla.edu/Published_Research_files/The%20value%20of%20fame-1.pdf
Education, just a means to that end. Hoop jumping. An afterthought.
If that's what you've got to work with, it's not hard to imagine why instructors might stop giving a damn.
Leading Edge Boomer says:
For more complete information about grade inflation, see
http://www.gradeinflation.com/
This page has data only through 2008, but it has some links to more recent articles. At the bottom one can select a university and see a list of how average grades have changed over the years.
The institutions with which I have been associated have seen little or no grade inflation. It is not a universal phenomenon.
Freecookies says:
There's an old saying about sheepherders and sheep. Something about how they come to resemble each other over time? Been awhile.
Everybody's like that, but students more so. Probably should say something about Hobbes and cynicism. But my experience has colored my perceptions that humans, in the collective – are lazy. If there's a duty to shirk, it's going to get shirked. Especially if someone else always steps in.
Or maybe it's not really laziness but efficiency? Maximum reward for minimum effort? With a lazerlike focus on how much effort can be minimized? Once you realize they're not seeking A's but the best grade for the least amount of work (and that includes grade haggling), their behavior makes perfect sense.
You make it clear that doing the problem sets is linearly proportional to the grade they get, they'll choose how much work they want to do for the reward.
The problem is if that relationship isn't linear, then they're likely to try to game the system by getting a really mediocre grade for almost no work at all. It's the ratio of grade to work they're sensitive to, not the grade itself.
If you're of an experimental type, try running a Marshmallow Test on your students and see which ones will spend more effort now for much less effort later. I bet most of them fail it.
Then again I am a cynic.
oiojes says:
There's a fundamental assumption that the issues are all with the students and not with the faculty in both the article and the comments. It ain't necessarily so. Like a lot things, it can be at least in part boiled down to incentives.
When I was an undergrad there were two courses that the campus community said were the hardest in the university: physical chemistry and comparative anatomy. Whether this was true has nothing to do with the reputation. I ended up taking both of them and I can say they were very hard.
Anyway, the first time I signed up for comparative anatomy the teacher gave this speech:
"How many in the course are pre-med? About half. How many are pre-vet? About a quarter. I expect the remainder are biology and other like courses, correct? Okay. An 'A' in this course is an absolute requirement for admission into med or vet school. I grade on a strict curve. There are 100 students in this course. There will be only 10 A's. Let's get started."
I dropped the course immediately and watched from afar.
The course was taking four preserved animals and dissecting them down to their component parts. Given the above speech, people were breaking into other people's lockers and cutting up their animals, actively sabotaging others grades, etc. It culminated int the fire bombing of the teacher's office. No one was hurt but much of his office was destroyed.
Ah, the 70's. Nothing says protest like a good firebombing.
The next year I signed up again. This teacher (a different one) gave this speech:
"I grade on a strict point system. Out of 500 points, 450 gets an A, 400 gets a B and so on. I don't care how many A's there are." (I forget the actual values.)
Lo and behold, people cooperated. Learning happened.
My point here is that we like to talk about this subject in the context that it is always the student's fault. And I think a lot of times it is. But I will not bore you with stories of when the professor/instructor/TA didn't bother to come to office hours, wrote incomprehensible tests, gave inconsequential and sometimes outright factually incorrect lectures and occasionally showed up drunk.
The good teachers I had were terrific and I managed to satisfy the bad ones. And a couple of times I gamed the system.
Look at it as an economic problem. There is still a big discrepancy in pay between the degreed and the undegreed. The cost is enormous. Each year more of these papers are required– at one point, college degrees were not required of IT positions. Now they are. Advanced degrees are preferred. Do these title convey knowledge? Sometimes. Are they necessary? Yes.
Given all of that, is it such a surprise that people will try to game the system?
Skipper says:
@Freecookies, the reason that sheep and sheep herders begin to resemble each other is because of all the interbreeding.
John Doheny says:
My initial reaction when I hear people with the college teaching job I USED to have and miss so badly my hair hurts is 'then shut the fuck up and let me have your job then." But further thought usually leads to empathy.
My own experience was that if you're untenured it's career suicide to grade students hard at a private university. They're money on the hoof, don't kill the goose etc. But cynical thinking like this leads inevitably to the conclusion that modern university education is simply a huge scam, a massive transfer of public money (student loans) into the endowments of private institutions. And that's the point when I usually discover I don't miss my teaching job quite that much.
Gerald McGrew says:
Well that sucks. I guess I just missed out on this whole gravy train ride.
My college experience (early to mid 1990's) was every professor in a non-elective course had the "My job is to weed as many of you out as possible" attitude, and the way they did this was by failing a lot of students. So they would make assignments and exams as ridiculously and needlessly difficult as possible.
I had to work my ass off for B's and C's (often the highest grades in the class). And honestly, it didn't do me a damn bit of good. The whole point of education is to impart knowledge, understanding, and thinking skills to students. Grades are secondary to that.
April says:
Ok, here's my story. When I was teaching (usually anatomy and physiology, and microbiology, but sometimes other related courses as well) my grades in those classes were usually about half A's and B's and half D's and F's. Perfect double curves. Almost no C's. The way I got away with this is that the students knew what was going to be on the tests, so either they learned it or they didn't. Can't fault the teacher in that case!
And sure, all my tests were essay, and there was a LOT of material to know. But before every exam I would go through the material and say "You should know this. You don't have to know that. etc" and then I would pick and choose which from all that to put on the exam. Occasionally (as I've mentioned before) I would tell them SPECIFICALLY something that would be on the test, but otherwise it was a grab-bag. But there were never any surprises. I would actually give out the exact questions, and I invited students to write out the answers in advance, which I would happily check over. "Yes, if you give me all this information, that is a complete correct answer." Again, can't blame the teacher if you don't get it right.
And there wasn't any competition, since theoretically, everyone could earn an A.
With regards to evaluations, I once had some jerkwad do that "A 3 (out of 5) is what we expect so to get a 5 you have to be super-duper special." Ok, fair enough, but then on things like attendance – perfect is a THREE?? What? I'm supposed to be here on the weekends when there are no classes? and "speaks clearly with suitable volume" – I grew up on a farm….I can call the hogs home…believe me, my students could always hear me! THREE??? AM I SUPPOSED TO SHOUT TO GET A 5?? When I complained my Dean said "Ignore him. No one looks at your evaluations anymore anyway, April." Ok then. Good to know.
April says:
@Anonymous Prof…..How do you cheat on a take-home exam? It's take-home. All refs/sources – yes, including other students – are available. I never saw the difference between a take-home exam and homework. Aside from lab reports I never gave either one.
Anonymous Prof says:
@April:
For one thing, a take-home exam is not a collaborative enterprise. It's supposed to be your own work.
Second, they copied from each other. What's your opinion on copying homework? Is it cheating, or is it collaboration? Bear in mind that these are students who have no idea what the answer actually means. They just copy a page of gibberish.
Third, there is the fundamental problem of the administration's attitude. Today I had to sit through a 90-minute presentation on how to police cheating. Afterward, I had the misfortune to sit with the Dean at lunch, as he kept saying, "Yeah, that really was a great presentation." But the presentation was bullshit, because none of it matters. What matters is that the Dean refuses to prosecute students for copying homework, regardless of what is said in the "great presentation."
What is the Dean's argument? If people are copying homework, then they don't consider that to be cheating. Therefore, ipso facto, I didn't explain my policies properly. And thus the only appropriate course of action is to give them full credit and do nothing. (Never mind that the official policy on first offenses is to give the student a zero on the assignment, and use it as a "teachable moment" to explain what they did wrong. And also never mind that one of the students has already been punished for copying homework, and thus clearly knows she's cheating.) Oh, and it "wasn't timely enough." I'm not sure why- maybe because the reports sat in the Dean's office forever before he did anything?
I'm sick and tired of all this bullshit. If a single student complains to the Dean that "everyone is failing his class!!!!!" then I'm hauled into an hour-long meeting with the Dean and dept. chair, and they don't even bother to ask me whether it's true. But if I give everyone an A, they gripe about that too. They fill my ear with hours of pompous crap about the need to catch cheaters, but when I bust my ass to catch them and file the paperwork, the paperwork is THROWN AWAY for reasons that are obvious bullshit.
And, on top of it all, it's not as though these students can function in college at all anyway. When the Dean teaches his chemistry class, maybe two students make A's, and the rest all fail every exam and quiz. So, he curves it. For the year when I took over his class, he didn't tell me any of this. He huffed and puffed about how I should hold the students to a high standard of excellence and give no curves at all- and then pulled me into yet another hour-long meeting with him and the Chair to tell me that we were in crisis mode because "everyone is failing your class." Well no shit, Dean, I told you they were failing that class and you told me to fail them all.
So, like I said, not my fucking problem anymore, and fuck them all.
April says:
@Prof
Even before the days of computers (and even calculators…yeah, I'm THAT old…sigh) I felt that homework/take-home exams were simply ways to benefit those students who really WANT to learn, even in grade and high schools. In general, I think most take-home work is pretty useless at the college level, ESPECIALLY now with the internet. There's just simply no way to police cheating, and if the work is graded then students who actually DO their own work are usually at a disadvantage.
I truly pity composition teachers!
Here in China cheating is open, blatant and not even particularly considered wrong. You want frustration? Our teachers have a real headache trying to get the students to understand that, when they go to a western university, plagiarism, copying from someone else, and LOOKING AT YOUR NEIGHBOR'S PAPER OR ASKING THEM FOR THE ANSWER DURING A TEST will be considered wrong and they might get thrown out of that university. The students just look at my teachers with that expression we use on those people with "get your government hands off my medicare" signs….you know – you poor, pathetic stupid people – look.
My technique was simply to remove as many opportunities for cheating as possible. I didn't even read the lab reports; students simply got (minimal) credit for turning one in.
And as I said, since I gave the students the actual questions, when they failed it was not my problem. I started my first class by saying "I don't care if you learn anything or fail…..(long pause)…if you don't care. If you work and try I will do everything I can to make sure you understand the material. But if you don't try, don't come to class, don't do any work, I'll still sleep well at night and get paid the same. So it's all up to you."
But it sucks to get mixed messages from your admin. My sympathies to you. I think some of those assholes don't remember what being in a classroom is all about.
Jesse says:
In my experience the creampuff grading philosophy doesn't permeate math departments as much as it does others. It was a long calculus-filled 10 years getting my bachelors degree. I kind of which I'd learned the frustration of failing when I was in high school, where I wasn't paying to be there.
Jado says:
As an engineer, I chuckle at the "copying a take home exam" part. My analysis of structures take home exam was 7 questions. I turned in 23 pages of hand-written calculations.
If one of my fellow students told me they could get me the answers, I wouldn't trust them farther that I could throw Wisconsin. Take-home exams in engineering are no big deal, because none of us know enough to be sure that our answers are correct. And upperclassmen just laugh the righteous laughter of traumatized survivors asking if they would kindly step back inside their trauma to benefit someone else.
One upperclassman threatened me with physical violence if I mentioned that class again in his presence.
weakonomics says:
@c u n d gulag You grossly misrepresent the new generation of workers currently entering the workforce. Sure, some of them to expect to the be pampered or treasured like a "precious little snowflake"…
But not most. There are plenty of young motivated people working their asses off to get a good job, or maybe simply get "a" job. I agree that a work culture crisis is beginning to take place in this country, but I also think that there are plenty of talented and ambitious people who are going to do their damnedest to make sure that it doesn't happen.
I personally work in a relatively large high school and the young members of the staff are revitalizing the building. They are bringing in energy and enthusiasm for their jobs and workplaces that was not here prior.
Just your friendly report from the trenches.
Best
weakonomics