YOU NEED EXPERIENCE FOR THE JOB...

This entry comes from "Sweets", a recent college graduate from Dominican University who majored in History and American Studies because he loved America so much. Here's what he got in return.

“Hey, college boy! Go break down the load and get your shit in order.”
Ah, the familiar instructions coming from my fellow co-worker never cease to make me smile. He is an interesting if not peculiar character - a former white supremacist and high school dropout with serious anger control issues who gets to work with sharp knives all day. My angry friend compliments my other associates: the ex-convict turned amateur internet poker star, the movie set worker who one day decided to leave sunny California and live in Chicago, the culinary arts graduate who is addicted to “having a good time” and me.
You may be wondering how someone nicknamed college boy found himself working with such a strange group of people. Perhaps I could blame this Great Recession and it’s effects on the job market? It is true that businesses have cut their workforce substantially leaving millions underemployed or unemployed. YES! The recession feasted on my dreams and left me licking the plate for crumbs! But how do I explain the millions of my fellow citizens who have found great jobs during this recession? It must be something else.

Maybe the politicians deserve to be held responsible for my predicament? After all, it was Congress, the state legislatures, and the Presidents who failed to heed the warnings of various economic agencies and analysts. Who can forget NAFTA, the tax incentives, and other policies which made American-based businesses move overseas to increase their profit margins? Yah-boo sucks to you, Joe American! Pedro in Honduras or Li in Chinacan do it cheaper and with less regulation! Those criminals in Congress tied the noose, stood me up, kicked the barrel, and left me to suffocate on my ambitions. However, is it fair to blame a group of people with the combined IQ of a comatose amoeba for simply creating the opportunity but not acting on the opportunity?

At last! That leaves only those base bankers, brokers, and businesses diabolically dealing demise through derivatives and predatory lending. Why not place the blame at the feet of those directly responsible for our current economic disaster? Well, despite how vilified these bumbling blokes are portrayed in the media, it is not entirely their fault. Just like that respectable guy who visits Las Vegas only to leave 3 months later thousands of dollars in debt, married to a silicone leaking stripper named Fifi, and wearing a soiled suit, the people of Wall Street were living in the moment and needed someone to pull them back into reality. Too bad the government regulation agencies are monitored by our comatose amoeba better known as Congress.

So who is to blame for my seemingly eternal residence in the Hell known to the world as the service industry? Last week the answer hit me harder than a brick being thrown by a rather portly Bavarian fellow wearing lederhosen.
“College boy! What the hell are you doing? Your stupid ass needs to get in gear because you are just floating around like an idiot.”

Just like that my belligerent co-worker opened my eyes to who is most to blame - me. Yes, I do have a college degree. Yes, I did graduate in the upper third of my class. Yes, I have volunteer hours and community service. In fact, I have a lot of the desirable traits many employers seek including the uncanny ability to present information in front of large groups without wetting myself from fear. My biggest problem is that I was too occupied in trying to live life that I forgot to be flexible and take what comes along. I’ve been holding onto this idea of what the good life, what living a life, is supposed to be and I’ve been blind to the reality. Maybe all those annoying bills, the crazy ex-girlfriends, the diets, and the beer - oh God the beer - are indications that I missed the bus on life and am now doomed to be stuck in the tortuous service industry where my soul will slowly rot away.
I need to jumpstart my life with a new battery but where can I find it? Will I once again be too rigid in my quest to find that new spark that I will miss it when it is in front of my face?

“Dammit college boy, stop staring into space and steak that fish for that customer.”

Irony comes in many shapes and guises. It was ironic that Galileo, a poor man with revolutionary views on the cosmos ended up vilified by elites who in their heyday claimed to be open to “intellectual” debate. It is ironic that we live in a globalizing age where a bomb that goes off in Cairo effects stock markets in a few seconds, yet most of us in our sadly gated communities couldn’t name our neighbors. It is also ironic in my view that blaming students for being unmotivated intellectually tends to come from faculty and administrators, in response as to why colleges have become dull intellectual places with lackluster international performance records.

So here is my view. Stop blaming the students so uncritically, and let’s start blaming the faculty. And let’s not set up a bogeyman of school boards that don’t seem to care, or City treasurers with a miserly grip on the coffers. Now here is how I ground this shift in finger pointing.

Firstly, it’s the faculty who set the curricula. It’s the faculty that develop their study guides, their tests, and run their classrooms. It’s the faculty that are largely control the monopoly on information in the classroom; after all, it’s none other than the professor that gives the A or the F. So let’s use common sense: it’s the faculty that deem ideas rational or not, correct or not, while they have their golden moments in the classroom. For all these reasons and more, I’m going to abandon the coquettishly fashionable view that sees the student as the captain of the college seaship. In my new view, it’s really the faculty that are captains of the vessel.

This is not an indictment against grades or homework. This is an indictment against those that find unmotivated students filling the classrooms. Faculty are stewards of the boat. If the students are unmotivated to learn, unmotivated intellectually, in my perspective, this results from faculty who are also equally unmotivated intellectually.

Now all finger pointing is only critical of me to say. We live in an era facing incredible economic pressures. We have a recession, a two-front war, a sliding value of the dollar, rising economic giants India and China, collapsing populations in the West and booming populations in the East. Perhaps students aren’t motivated intellectually nowadays because what’s being said in the classroom does not link the ideas on the chalkboard to the hard reality outside. It’s a question of priorities- while professors keep their paychecks and tenured status; students are being grinded through a mill that constantly reminds them of how unmotivated they all are.

If faculty had to face the same grim realities of a sunken labor market that would be one thing. However in my surmise, this is not true. If this were really true, then how it is time and again I meet students so completely oblivious; trying to live up to the stereotypical uncouth, ‘I don’t know why I’m here’ mystique of the college experience. I once blamed the students 100% for this, but not now. This happens because faculty, with their exalted ivory tower thrones, continually feed misinformation about what awaits students when they leave. “Study what you want, focus on what you enjoy,” or “look at the income earnings of college degrees overtime,” etc. A lot of times these statistics are so ambiguous it’s hard to directly refute, and why would we? It would be a tad unsettling to go to college and yet know the worth of your degree was questionable at best.

What this chipper viewpoint does is alter reality. See, great winners, like chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, good football teams, etc, grow in performance from training and studying victories AND failures, from knowing how they are weak and why. Its not a question of pessimism; its common sense. How often are we treated to statistics of college graduates stuck at Starbucks or McDonald’s for five years straight? Of MBAs living hand to mouth in a labor market that simply hasn’t provided the jobs? If I saw faculty alerting students to the bad as well as the good, this article would be unnecessary.

However I don’t see that happening and in such dark times it’s distressing. What is happening in effect is the mill is running young minds in on highly warped yet overly optimistic views on the economic realities facing them after graduation. This is a betrayal of a whole generation at work. So yes it is a question of priorities: do we ruffle the feathers of a Ph.d that hasn’t seen the unemployment lines stretching, or do we finally let go of this mystique of college as being a bastion where the unkempt looking and oblivious can rest assured great times are always just around the corner? It’s our youth vs. injured pride. There should be no question about which priority gets put first.

Now its only polite to offer a solution since I pointed blame. Those students and faculty that would agree with me how utterly idiotic it is to always and only point to the good and great and not the bad and ugly about college and its aftermaths need to meet together. We need to meet together and start a new counter movement in our school so that we can really strive for the best. Instead of sweeping all this under the rug and then blaming the students for ignorance and lethargy, let’s actually TRY to think innovatively for once to save this generation from being chewed up in the grist mill of a nearly bottomless recession economy.