“Colleges are graduating a surfeit of young people who lack hard or even soft skills…They believe their degrees aren’t being adequately rewarded by the free market and blame capitalism.” Those are the words of Wall Street Journal columnist Alyssia Finley. The bet here is she could be persuaded to be more optimistic.
Finley is writing about the New Yorkers who recently elected socialist Zohran Mamdani mayor. She’s channeling a popular view inside a conservative commentariat populated with elite-educated writers (Finley is a Stanford grad) that this time is different for the grads of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford (along with schools adjacent to those four). Supposedly the elite schools are no longer measuring up, thus Mamdani. But the complaint is as old as those schools, and probably older.
That’s because “these kids today” most certainly goes back as far in civilization to when it began to progress. Which means that “these kids today,” along with laments like Finley’s, are a brilliant and bullish sign of prosperity. If kids aren’t entitled, that means they know decline. Thankfully in the U.S. we only know progress, hence youthful entitlement. After which, complaints about left-leaning academics are hardly new.
In Kingdom of Fire, Scott Howard-Cooper’s book about the 1960s-70s UCLA basketball dynasty, he writes of how parents of would-be UCLA Bruins were told “You don’t want to send your son there because he’ll become a communist, he’ll become a drug addict.” As a Stanford grad, Finley is perhaps familiar with John L’Heureux’s (a Stanford English professor) classic 1996 novel, The Handmaid of Desire, in which L’Heureux described in wildly comedic fashion a hopelessly left-wing faculty at “The University,” an obvious stand-in for Stanford. Capitalist-hating left-wing faculties are far from new, nor is handwringing about what they're teaching.
What’s important is that it doesn’t matter what young people are learning, or not. Finley’s Stanford shows us why: while all manner of Stanford drop-outs are creating an Artificial Intelligence-informed future that promises to bullishly erase millions of different jobs, they’re doing so without having majored in AI in much the same way that Jeff Bezos (Princeton) couldn’t have majored in e-commerce, and Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard dropout) in social media. Really, how to major in what you’ve largely created on your own?
Which hopefully raises eyebrows about Finley’s critiques of the alleged victims of grade inflation. First, in writing as she does about them placing the blame for their problems on capitalism, it’s easy to forget where the young people elevating capitalism before our eyes were themselves educated, or for that matter the education of the employers utilizing "surveillance state" technology on Mamdani voters.
Second, based on the happy erasure of so much work of the present and past, what on earth does education at any school (Ivy League, public Ivy, or trade) have to do with the jobs of the future as is? Tick tock, tick tock.
What will the young do? They’ll thrive as they always have precisely because technology doesn’t put them out of work as much as it increasingly frees them to do what’s most associated with their unique skills and intelligence, including “scrolling TikTok.” Until then, and as the allegedly socialist young are finding themselves, they can watch old movies (Reality Bites, Singles, Slacker), read old books (Theft of the Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future by Finley's colleague Joseph Sternberg, or Disinherited: How Washington Is Betraying America’s Young), and pamphlets (A Message to Garcia) to get a chuckle about how nothing changes, that the young of the near and distant past similarly had no economic future, and hated capitalism much as up-in-arms pundits worry today’s young do.
