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I've heard this all my life from teachers and professors. I went to university many years before covid and profs were always ranting about how unprepared our cohort was and how it was so different back in the day, and high school standards are falling off a cliff and they must offer all sorts of prep courses about stuff that used to be core high school material. And a few years before that, my high school teachers were ranting about how primary schools don't prepare students for high school any more and they must repeat primary school material during the first year. And this is in Hungary where there is no "customer mentality" in education like in the US.
The reality is, the fraction of capable people per cohort is fixed (or grows very slowly) over time, but more and more people are going to higher and higher educational levels. At that point it's basically inevitable that every new cohort looks less and less prepared and cannot learn the same material as the cohorts a decade prior.
Thank you. I now understand why I'm so painfully frustrated every time I try to play D&D with the current crop of players.
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Hmm, interesting point.
I had the opposite experience exactly once. We had a freshly minted professor get assigned to Circuits I as his first class. Probably 100 students. He’s a huge hardass and assigns a ton of homework, plus difficult exams. Unusually high fail rate even for that class.
The next semester’s Circuits II professor told us, after the first exam: “For the last 5 years, I’ve always had the same score distribution on this test, to within a few percentage points. You guys are weirdly well prepared.” We knew why.
That was the one and only time that it didn’t match your experience.
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I kind of thought that the top 5000 high school graduates today have to be better prepared than the top 5000 from 30 years ago. Those are the ones who have been raised to do this since pre-K. Honors and AP classes all the way.
So either the "top" 5000 high school students now are those who resume-padded the most, and/or they have a learned behavior to just manipulate the system instead of doing actual work.
I agree. Things are much more competitive now compared to 30 years ago in terms of math competitions, high-stakes testing, and also selecting from a much larger pool of students. Today's top students are probably much more talented than the top students of 50+ years ago. But maybe the median student is less prepared.
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Resume padding doesn't exist in Europe, you get admitted based on cold hard criteria like tests and grades, not cozy fluffy stuff like extracurriculars, quality of personality and "well-roundedness". Still it seems that standards have to be lowered steadily. This is understandable for universities that are growing in student count. For already very selective schools like NYU, it's probably due to a change in selection criteria.
Old-man-yelling-at-clouds time: It's maybe too easy to say that today's generation is coddled and soft. But there does seem to be a difference. Youths always used to be entitled/lazy/whatever, but that was in defiance of the messaging towards them. Now a generation has grown up who were told all along that they are a special little unique snowflake whose greatest value lies in "being who they are". (It's tempting but probably futile to summarize entire generations like this but whatever.) At the same time though, it seems that zoomers are more neurotic, anxious, self-conscious etc., drink less alcohol, have less sex, drive slower, generally are more aware of their constant public image (online, and also in person due to the constant presence of Internet-connected cameras in people's pockets). The stakes are high all the time, and reality smacks people in the face compared to what they were told.
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