All that jazz about the "millennials" ... blame higher education, at least partly

Consistent with my personality to happily march to my own drumbeat if I find others to be way too cacophonous, the last few years I have been worried about all the hype about the millennial generation.  It served as a wonderful marketing gimmick, no doubt, in the higher education industry: advertise to a whole bunch of gullible teenagers that they have boundless talents and abilities to go with limitless opportunities and, hey, the world is your oyster. So, they too responded by attending college in huge numbers and, now I hope the youth are beginning to see how much they were duped.  I hope.

Speaking of her fellow millennials, Alexandra Petri writes in the WaPo:

Our problem is not lack of finesse. Or, Lord knows, lack of social media linkages. It's lack of content.

It's the Lady Gaga problem: slick design, marvelous presentation, catchy tunes, no real there there. Listen to her anthem, "Born this Way." Those lyrics could mean anything. At one point I think she told me I was an air freshener.

Everyone used to like her. Now, well, she's wearing thin.

And so is President Barack Obama. No wonder she showed up at a recent event of his.

Obama "absolutely" agreed when asked this week if he worries that today's college graduates do not have the same opportunities the baby boom generation did. America has "gotten soft," the president continued.

But our problem as a generation isn't just that hipsters are trying to bring our living standard back to that of a badly remembered 1960s. ("There were records and plaid," they say. "Beyond that we could not really say.")

We are starving for content.

Form we understand. We are the generation of vague statements and good graphic design. And no wonder we gravitate toward Twitter, where you have the illusion of talking without the room to actually say anything. We have nothing to say. 

In higher education, it feels like we actively cultivate this all-slick and little to no content approach, and inflate the millennials' egos, who find out, only after graduation, that the real world outside rewards content.  Lady Gaga, excepted, of course!