Dear Business Leaders, Please Make up your Zarking Minds!

Another installment in a series.  This one has been simmering for a while, but I decided to finally post in response to this little tidbit of hamster-nard-sucking wankery.

Dear Business Leaders,

            I wonder if I might have a moment of your time to try to straighten out an issue that has been troubling me.  I do apologize for presuming on your time like this, given that I’m not going to fork over any money for this consultation.  I hear you when you say how competitive you are. How money talks and bullshit walks, or however that charming catchphrase goes.  How there’s no free ride.  So it is with considerable deference that I approach with my humble request that you Please make up your Zarking minds!  Is the customer always right or not?

            I keep hearing about the importance of the business model.  And I sort of get it.  I took a little economics back in high school (and no, not of the home variety).  In a world of limited resources, there is no free ride.  Ultimately, we all have to convince others to pay for our wares, and if nobody is willing to pay, perhaps we should switch to doing something else.  OK, that seems pretty reasonable.  I’m a little uncomfortable about it, but I can see that maybe the students are customers.  Sort of.  If I hold my head to one side and kindof half close one eye.  I can at least meet you part way, and recognize that the one’s I’m spending all this time in the classroom for is the students.  So if they pay tuition, then that sortof makes them customers.

            So the customers are always right, huh?  Well then what in the name of the Arkelseizure's nose hairs are they doing in the classroom?  I mean, why would anybody pony up big tuition bucks if they are always right?  Are they insane?  No, that can’t be it, because then they wouldn’t be always right, and therefore, couldn’t possibly be customers.  So what gives?

            And while I’ve got your attention, here’s another one that troubles me.  See, every time I turn around one of you business leaders is going off about how colleges aren’t doing a good enough job with the students (er… customers, sorry).  How graduates don’t have the skilz they need to win the brave new future.  How most of them struggle to find their own blastopores with both hands and a flashlight. 

It's great that you have a degree, but can you plug in a printer?

Last Friday I attended a conference which addressed the place of the Community College in the 21st century.  There were a lot of speakers there, from the two state legislators who were primarily responsible for passing a bill in my state that will drastically reduce the amount of remedial help we will be allowed to give high school graduates who come to us unable to read, write or do simple math, to the president of one of our state universities, to business and community leaders.

The business and community leaders were the most interesting, informative and relevant.  Anyway, one of them, a man who owns a rather large company in our state which employs electrical and mechanical engineers (we have an AS in both of those areas) told this story.  His company needs to hire young men and women who have degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering.  They hire people with both four year and two year degrees, for different jobs.

He says he has never been more disappointed with the new college graduates  than he has been in the past ten to fifteen years, and it is getting worse.  The biggest problem, he says, in his field is not really that the college graduates, be they two or four year grads, have not learned the technical knowledge they needed to learn in their college classes.  The problem, he says, is that today's college grads are helpless and annoying and come to him with a huge sense of entitlement.  To try to find the kind of employee he needs in his company, he does a simple test during his interviews: