Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

This is a hard post for me to write. Why? Because I am an inveterate fan of the age group I teach — 18-24 year olds. I’ve spent my entire career advocating for them, and threw down with our idiot Provost (you can find out who she is if you’re really interested — do note she showed the max salary one could earn with an anthropology degree) but my efforts did not succeed in any meaningful lifting of COVID restrictions during the pandemic.

As we ethereally float through the subsequent years from 2023, when I would consider the pandemic officially “over” (whatever that means) it becomes increasingly obvious that young folks, in critical developmental stages, took major damage to their psychosocial development. The fact that it’s not discussed, other than with the occasional “tsk, tsk” is a societal failure. You cannot fix what you don’t acknowledge, and you can’t acknowledge what one’s flaccid institutional philosophy won’t even recognize. It makes you wonder what all the human development people are doing. So this is my take. Make of it what you will.

For the record, I run a large engineering design program, that fulfills the capstone (last class) requirement for a moderately large undergraduate university mechanical engineering program. My program is profoundly different from most programs, though, in that I seek out sponsored work from corporate elements, with real deliverables. The money allows my students to participate in a real trial run in being a practicing engineer, as well as practice basic business travel skills. Because I’m located in Pullman, WA (the functional ends of the Earth) almost all the clients for the program are somewhere across the state, and occasionally across the nation or the planet. Most kids drive back to the west side of Washington to visit their sponsors, but some get on planes. Almost all stay in hotels (it’s often the first time where they’re completely responsible for reservations, etc.) and they must deal with their client as a real customer. All of this is intentional.

Young people’s brains are relatively soft at 22, but they are on a trajectory to adulthood that for most will occur around 26 years. It’s my job to make sure they are on the right trajectory. Most of my students are young men, though I have a modest percentage of young women as well. There are developmental differences between the two sexes, but it’s not significant in the context of my class. What the students are really working forward to is establishing an independent professional identity as an engineer. The real work, and the real deliverables, buttress this path. Students simply cannot argue with me that the work is somehow irrelevant, or “jumping through hoops.” Someone they might want to work for has given the work to me, and paid for it. And my sponsors are not allowed to exclusively mentor the students. The clients are supposed to act like customers (they have a script.) I’ve educated somewhere north of 3800 students, with over 550 projects. As a friend of mine once said “Chuck — no one has turned more design cycles than you.” I think that’s a bit much, but not by much.

During the pandemic, we carried on as best we could. When students were sent home in March 2020, our remote work practice game was already strong — we live in Pullman, after all, and all the work was completed on time. My clients were amazed, but I was not surprised. And we held up through the isolation of Fall 2020. Projects were still on Zoom, but I had demanded one of our best classrooms for it (it looks like the War Room in Dr. Strangelove) and we did OK. In Spring 2021, I forcefully lobbied for face-to-face classes (many students were already in Pullman, since they had rental agreements) but allowed kids to decide if they wanted to Zoom in or sit in the classroom. About half did. But their faces were masked.

People cannot understand how absolutely destructive masking is in the educational process until you have to teach a roomful of masked kids, that have to collaborate together. A big part of my class is getting kids to form high-performance teams, as well as get to know others in the class. Our situation at WSU is not particularly unique. The students after they graduate will go over to the Puget Sound area and work with each other. It’s a small world. But if you don’t have an opportunity to get to know your alumni peer group, it hurts. On top of that, it also makes it impossible for me to remember individuals in my class. Masks destroy individual identity — that’s the point. And this matters as far as placement goes. Lots of alums count on me for recommendations, and I can’t give them if I don’t know the students.

The downstream result, though, is that instead of having 50 friends, the students mostly ended up with one or two. If there was a pattern, it seemed that students never exceeded a peer group of over four. No cross-group relationships really formed up. So any kind of scaling management of friends at appropriate distances also did not develop.

We were all back in person in Fall 2021, but still masked. The students held up pretty well until November. And then there was kind of a cascading collapse of spirit. Students stopped looking for jobs, we had an increase in predatory hiring from low level companies, and initiative fell through the floor. Spring 2022 was the weirdest vibe (everyone was still in masks for most of the semester) I’ve ever experienced. No one could seem to connect with anyone outside the 3-4 person affinity groups. We all shipped product — one thing that has been interesting is that students’ ability to design things (somewhat a function of individual creativity) did not decline.

But the social scaffolding started falling away. Knowing how to act took a hit. The construction of their social framework, both internally and externally, was not sufficient. And to this day, they still suffer.

But what does that really mean? For a more structured view of deficiencies, we have to go back to our canonical Knowledge Structures. From my experience, students start developing Tribal knowledge around 4 (think birthday parties, Christmas and Santa Claus) and then lean into Authority-driven codes around 6. These continue to be embellished and expand as students get older. Legal behavioral coding (rule following) starts in earnest around 10, and by the time they’re about 20 they learn to trust their own judgment, and focus on goal-based behavior. During their entire youth/young adulthood, though, they continue developing all these modes and structures.

This leads to important social coding development — which directly influences how they will get jobs. People interviewing engineering students are looking for mature actors. Engineering is not like most jobs where decisions are inconsequential. Bad decisions can kill people. And while every engineering firm has a process of check and cross-check on major decisions, most importantly you want your young engineer to recognize they might NOT know something, and backtrack and find a more experienced engineer to help them.

But now, we come to a rub. Students are underdeveloped because of the pandemic in the primary understandings of both authority-driven and legalistic hierarchy. They can sullenly submit to Authority. But they don’t know why, and the false obedience they’ve been beat into them in grade school and high school turns into a liability. They’ve never been conditioned to understand the higher rationality of turning to your elders for knowledge. Older people, already severed from contact for 3+ years, are not viewed as a resource at all.

And young women suffer more than any. All the academy does is teach that men in general, and certainly older men in specific, are predators to be avoided at best. This is deeply problematic in engineering, because most of the people ANYONE deals with are older men. The dynamic became even more exacerbated during the pandemic – a distorted social compounding of alienation. And writing about it is taboo.

In the absence of any formal development, students will compensate, mostly through cultural borrowing. And in the modern university, that cultural borrowing is the ethos of the Longhouse. Everyone’s a victim, or potential victim. Always be nice, regardless of the circumstance. Empathy is sympathy. And who can really empathize when you can’t see someone’s face? You can’t read people. So at best you can struggle through indoctrination of codes about people’s ethnicities.

The lack of ability to follow simple rules really emerged during the pandemic, and continues through to this day. I had a situation this last semester where students from another section were barging into my classroom during lecture. My classroom is somewhat unique in that it has some lab construction space as well as a large set of tables. I also keep that classroom unlocked at all hours so students can congregate.

I finally got tired of the lecture time intrusions. I asked the students why they were in my classroom. “We want to work on our projects.” I said “No — now get out.” But instead of all of them leaving, three scurried out quickly. A large young man and a young woman proceed across the classroom to fetch some of their items, in obvious defiance of my mandate. The young man stood there and glowered at me. I sit on a couch at the front where I lecture from. I didn’t move. At the same time, I was rolling my eyes and thinking “what kind of gangsta shit is this??”

The students were admonished by my co-instructor later. But none came back to apologize for their behavior. Instead, a couple decided to play games with lecture time. And more than a few hung outside the door like feral raccoons, unsure of what to do. Insane. These are college seniors.

Now I’m an old dog — or as I like to refer to myself, an Old Bull Elephant. Most of my students are young men, and it’s the job of the Old Bull Elephant to civilize the younger bulls. It’s simply not a job for the faint of heart, and at 62, it’s about time for me to retire. So I decided to ask the Young Bull Elephants in my own section about what they thought about me throwing the other students out who had come in. They had very mixed, averse feelings. Most were along the lines of “they were just getting their stuff” or some such icks. I took it as an opportunity to explain to them that showing up in a restricted space at work, without permission, is generally a firing offense. You’ll be expected of a safety violation, or potentially industrial espionage. Not a good look. I asked one of the young women in the class, whom I’d had a good relationship with. Her comment? “It was more disruptive to do what you did.” It was obvious where her affinities lay. As well as her understanding of hierarchy and boundaries.

But what I did learn with the dialogue with the students was simple. They were four years behind. They couldn’t understand appropriate boundaries. They really couldn’t understand my position of authority. And they also couldn’t see why you might need rules or protocols to navigate a work environment. The ensemble of all these things turns into what I call social coding – that mix of communicated signals about how things work in an environment so a.) work gets done, and b.) conflict is minimized.

Even with my own sons (26 and 24) I see pandemic deficits. Their social circles are notoriously small. The younger son, a computer science major, went to college during the entire COVID cycle, and to say they were betrayed by the professoriate is an understatement. Most of his professors went back to countries of origin, to deliver lectures online, and often just published online. Billed as convenience for students, the reality is that both sides, students and faculty, played into a near-total collapse of expectations. It’s no surprise that both my sons are professionally successful, but are in a process of rebuilding socially. In the context of my kids, it’s with a large 3rd generation Mexican family who works with the younger boy. When you don’t have the scaffolding, the smart bet is build from the bottom up. I’m grateful. But it’s still a tremendous loss for them of that time.

I happened across a video some may find offensive (you’ve been warned) that completely captures the meta-problem. In the video, a young woman is being asked, in front of her boyfriend, what’s the most guys she ever slept with in one night. She said ‘ten’. He became extremely unhappy, and broke up with her on camera.

Her rationalization is self-centered. In her morality, she had not been unfaithful during their relationship, so any actions she had decided to take before simply were irrelevant — to the point where she would disclose this on-camera. There were no real rules save those created in her brain, and the only thing that mattered was the “now”. She doesn’t seem to exhibit any particular neurodivergence or condition. Instead, it is a meta-constructed behavior of the age. And while it might be interesting to speculate on her state of mind, it’s more helpful to understand this, instead of the “kindness matters” solipsistic frame of mind, as a reversion to a more Tribal/Magical mindset of unregulated sex. It is indicative of where we are as a society, and not just in the context of some moral vacuum. As long as you’re nice, you can do what you want. And in true post-modern form, everyone else has to eat the sandwich.

People do ask me how, going forward, they should guide their own children. I tell them all the same thing — socialization is THE most important part of adolescence and post-adolescence. It used to be implicit (if sometimes mocked.) But now it has to become explicit.

And if you’re looking for guidance out of the contemporary academy, I’ve got some bad news. We’re chock-a-block full of neurodivergent individuals, and outright disruptors. They will produce no meaningful research to show that these things are important, and will only grudgingly come to any level of acceptance that we were enormous part of the problem during the pandemic. Trust me — I’m not going to receive any academic award for writing this piece.

But we have to recover. More socialization. More work ethic. More understanding of boundaries. And more fun. It’s the way forward. Because life is short. And our elaborate, complex society offers little time for this generation to start on the trajectory to create their own families.

We already robbed them of four years for our elite paranoia.