The curtain is closing on the spring semester of my twenty-seventh year of teaching. Twenty-seven years is an entire generation. My first students, Fuqua MBAs in the Class of 2000, were my age.* My current students, Colorado undergrads in the class of 2027, are 36 years younger.
People ask me, “is this generation of students different?” Thirty-six years is enough of a span to notice differences. And the answer is, well, no and yes.
On the one hand, no. Students are people. People respond to structure, incentives, and caring. That hasn’t changed.
On the other hand, yes. Jean Twenge studies generations, and she finds that the current younger generation reached adult milestones of independence, like getting drivers’ licenses, later than earlier ones. Her thesis is that the smart phone stunted their transition to adulthood and harmed their mental health. The addictiveness of the devices with insidious and nonstop access to social comparisons has taken a toll.
Those findings are statements about the typical member of the generation. Of course there are differences within the generation, and it is those differences that make it hard to know how to help.
Here’s my take on the big challenge with this group: some of our students need to be told “CHILL OUT!” and some need to be told “STEP IT UP!” but if you give either message, exactly the wrong people hear it. It’s a vexing type of crossed wires, a message inversion.
What do I mean by CHILL OUT!? Care more about learning and less about grades. Care more about relationships and less about whether an activity looks good on the resume. Care more about the potential of the future and less about optimizing the current moment. Invest in exploring the possibilities for the future, even if exploring can’t be obviously quantified as a near-term win.
My friend Matt writes about the obsession—and problem—with tallying Ws (wins) and Ls (losses). (I asked him if he was ready to be a character on my blog. He said he was, so I introduce to you DBE, Dear Behavioral Economist.) He calls the activity of tallying Ws and Ls “taking stock,” and argues it distracts us from experiencing the flow of our lives.
But telling someone who needs to chill that they should chill…well, that doesn’t work.
So how do I get the good news out to my students that life has delightful mud puddles** in store? My favorite way is to introduce current students to former students. Hearing the concrete stories of alumni who sat in those same classroom seats can be enlightening, clarifying, and inspiring. Everyone has stories of “here’s how I thought was going to go…and it did not go that way….but that was OK, too.” I don’t think we can hear those stories enough. If you have taken an introduction to one of my students and shared those stories, thank you!
As for the people who need to hear STEP IT UP!? I am sufficiently self-aware to realize that maybe I’m wrong and you don’t need to hear that. Maybe it is just I, who still needs to CHILL OUT!, that thinks you should STEP IT UP! So, keep being you.
And I will keep being me.
*I started teaching MBAs when I was 29. Their average age was 27-28, so many were my age or older. I was young, but I was an old young. I had been married for a while and had two children. I had a minivan. I brushed off any concern about my youth with the logic that sure, I was their age now, but I am getting older every year and the students will always be in their twenties. Or, as I think I said, “I get one year older every year and they stay the same age.”
I repeated this line a lot. It was MANY years later that someone explained the significance of that line (thank you, John H.!). In the movie Dazed and Confused (1993), Matthew McConaughey plays a twentysomething who parties with, and hits on, high schoolers. His line, delivered with lecherous glee: “I keep getting older and they keep staying the same age.” I like to think my delivery had an entirely different tenor!
**My favorite mud puddle picture:
