It’s tough to keep a job these days. At least, it’s proving tough for many members of Generation Z, young adults born after 1997, because they’re getting fired at shocking levels, according to a new survey from Intelligent.com.
An astounding six in 10 employers surveyed have already fired college graduates they’d only brought on earlier this year, the Daily Mail reports of the survey. One in seven businesses added that they may not hire recent college graduates next year due to the problems they’ve encountered.
What’s wrong with these young employees?
“Business leaders listed concerns in areas such as communications skills and professionalism that made them wary of hiring Gen Z,” the Daily Mail says. “They also said the workers of that age are often unmotivated and need to be constantly told what to do — rather than using their initiative.”
The survey results really are remarkable. A whopping 75% of the companies surveyed reported that at least some of their recently hired college graduates were “unsatisfactory” and half said their young additions were difficult to work with and unmotivated.
It’s easy to blame Gen Zers for their reported laziness and simply tell them to do better. But attributing these failures solely to the personal shortcomings of young people these days is an oversimplification that fails to capture the nuance of the situation. Young people are being raised in a particular environment that’s leading to these worse outcomes, and that means there’s plenty of blame to go around.
One chief culprit is surely the higher education system, which is supposed to prepare young adults for the workforce, but evidently isn’t doing a very good job.
“Many recent college graduates may struggle with entering the workforce for the first time as it can be a huge contrast from what they are used to throughout their education journey,” Intelligent.com concluded in its report. “They are often unprepared for a less structured environment, workplace cultural dynamics, and the expectation of autonomous work.”
That’s right: Modern colleges often infantilize young adults, through “trigger warnings,” safe spaces, grade inflation where it’s easy to get As, and other wildly unrealistic elements of campus life. I’ll never forget one time at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when my dormitory put Care Bears up on the walls — yes, Care Bears! — reminding college sophomores and juniors to drink water, brush their teeth, and sleep eight hours a night. Have you ever heard of a workplace that remotely looks like this?
It is not surprising that college students who “graduate” from this kind of adult daycare then struggle in the real world. And frankly, it’s not even all their own fault.
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A hefty piece of the blame belongs with the foolish administrators who’ve set young people up to fail and politicians who have funded these failure factories no matter how bad results become. And behind every young adult getting fired for his workplace entitlement or poor attitude is a set of parents, who in many cases may have coddled their child for far too long.
It’s a serious problem that so many young people are struggling to adapt to the work force and being fired at high rates as a result. But as tempting as it can be just to blame the Gen Z “snowflakes,” older generations bear part of the blame for the results of the system they created.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.