Stephens:
To the Class of 2012
Attention graduates: Tone down your egos, shape up
your minds.
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Dear Class of 2012:
Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions
that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have
spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in
order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy,
courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with
such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to
look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who
spent a fortune on your education only to get you back—
return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.
No doubt some of you have overcome real hardships or taken real
degrees. A couple of years ago I hired a summer intern from West Point.
She came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises in which
she kept a bulletproof vest on at all times, even while sleeping. She
writes brilliantly and is as self-effacing as she is accomplished. Now
she's in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.
If you're like that intern, please feel free to feel sorry for
yourself. Just remember she doesn't.
Unfortunately, dear graduates, chances are you're nothing like her. And
since you're no longer children, at least officially, it's time someone
tells you the facts of life. The other facts.
Fact One is that, in our "knowledge-based" economy, knowledge counts.
Yet here you are, probably the least knowledgeable graduating class in
history.
A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high
GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle
East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was
vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the
United States in 1956. And he didn't know who succeeded that president.
Pop quiz, Class of '12: Do you?
Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of
education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to
think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top
schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of
blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for
motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't
know where the dots are in the first place.
Now to Fact Two
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