With the economic recession now in full swing, many are quick to point their finger (in the now-typical American way) at someone else, deflecting blame from themselves and their affiliates. Democrats claim the fault lies with deregulation and poor oversight of Wall Street. Celebrity-status economists say they underestimated the greed of corporate America, while others safely conclude that the situation is too complex for blame to be placed. However, in the midst of this culture of finger-pointing, it becomes quite apparent that America the adolescent is at fault, and every cell has made a contribution. It’s time for America to grow up, starting with our generation.
Students today have grown accustomed to a drastically different learning environment from that of the past. The accumulation of knowledge, desire to master a subject and general curiosity itself are dwarfed by the importance of building a good resume and simply looking good on paper. In high school (and some college) environments, students are discouraged by their peers from asking questions about related material that they will not be tested on. Even within the Binghamton Scholars program, the alleged cream of the crop, many students use their class selection priority to seek out the easiest classes (based on course description and RateMyProfessors.com comments) to fulfill GenEd requirements in order to retain the highest possible GPA instead of enrolling in challenging upper-level classes in order to stretch their minds. With such emphasis on excelling on the next examination, students fail to apply their new-found knowledge to their ideally ever-changing worldview, and instead only retain a mechanical, trivial understanding of the subject that, while they have mastered on paper, they have purged from their memory in order to make room for their next test. But it doesn’t matter, because an undergraduate won’t need to know how to do calculus after they get their MBA and start making money, right?
Unfortunately, there are repercussions. For instance, before this financial meltdown, many young individuals with stellar resumes, having just graduated from Ivy League schools, found themselves in a situation where adults were willing to pay top dollar for their “expert” investment advice by snagging a job for Citigroup or Lehman Brothers as an “analyst.” This would be a dream for many individuals, yet we have seen how this situation plays out: the analyst makes insane amounts of money advising investors, without ever possibly taking an accounting course (or not applying the knowledge from their accounting course to allocating funds) or managing their own savings, much less running their own business, all the while being more interested in making money than responsibly allocating capital (if they even know how to do such a thing). The result is one unhealthy economy, and a bunch of once-respected, highly-paid analysts out of work.
Our generation needs to create real value, as opposed to the superficial. Creating real value will not only lead to increased individual job security, but it will also help our overall community organism grow, so that more useful commodities and services will be available to enrich our lives, and the first step as students to creating real value is taking a genuine interest in what we study: learning for understanding instead of forcing ourselves to learn for a piece of paper.