Our education system’s biggest threat? Millennials

HARD work and hitting the books has become a thing of the past, apparently. So too has actually attending university, writes Kerry Parnell.

I WAS on a train this week when two students sat beside me and began comparing notes on their university courses.

One was taking a journalism degree, so I was interested to eavesdrop how he was faring; until he told his buddy about the classes he’d ditched because they were “pointless”.

“We had some guest lecturer,” he said, “who was a photographer. He was explaining all this shit about framing and asked us to go outside and take a photo of something newsworthy.

“I left. I was like, mate, I’ve been taking pictures on my phone for 12 years — I don’t need to learn anything.”

I was tempted to give him a very big lesson indeed, but kept quiet and prayed he never turned up in a newsroom near me.

Seriously. What kind of millennial muppet pays thousands of dollars to get a degree and can’t be bothered to listen to anything it teaches? The only thing he looked like he had a distinction in was hipster beards.

According to new research, the millennial generation doesn’t like to memorise things, making study near impossible. (Pic: supplied)

And yet it’s not his fault apparently — according to workplace experts, dinosaurs like me shouldn’t expect millennials to have to learn anything, as it bores them.

“The younger workforce rejects having to memorise things that seem pointless to them. They are more protective of their brain space,” says Javier Montes, author of Millennial Workforce: Cracking the Code to Generation Y in Your Company. “Older generations couldn’t Google answers to questions they faced. Information is so much more available that I think it changes what we should be asking these people to master and learn.”

Over the years I have hosted hundreds of work experience students and over 50 per cent of them were visibly crestfallen by the end of day one that they were not interviewing rock stars or editing the newspaper. A third wouldn’t come back the next day citing a “family emergency.” It was so standard that the rare young person who showed any initiative would be asked back, and often given a job. That’s how I got my first break.

Cramming before exam time? Not likely in this day and age. (Pic: supplied)

Still, I suppose I should be grateful he was actually going to college — he could have been one of the growing number of people buying fake degrees online instead. An investigation this week uncovered 215,000 fake qualifications are sold a year worldwide by Axact, a Pakistani “diploma mill”, offering certifications to doctors, nurses and even helicopter pilots.

Australian of the Year finalist Eman Sharobeem, former CEO of the Immigrant Women’s Health Service, told a corruption inquiry last year that she could not remember lying about allegedly claiming to have two PhDs in psychology. “My memory cannot at all remember anything,” she said.

In October, Nicholas Crawford was convicted of faking his qualifications and working as a nurse in the Northern Territory — including in the intensive care unit of the Royal Darwin Hospital. He joined Shyam Acharya, who faked his way to working as a doctor in NSW hospitals for 11 years before eventually being caught.

And in September, South Australia’s Department of Premier and Cabinet chief information officer Veronica Theriault was sacked when it emerged she’d used a fake CV to get the job.

So if train twerp is reading this, pull your head in and pay attention. You can’t always fake it till you make it. Mate.