jaybird3rd

They also have a very hard time expressing even simple things in writing.  For example, I'm contacted by students via e-mail with problems they encounter on their workstations.  They need me to remote in and take a look because, they say, they "can't explain what's happening."  So I go in and look, and it turns out that it's something they could have described in two or three simple sentences.  Even if the problem could be fixed much more efficiently through an e-mail exchange, they'd rather let it sit and wait for me to be available to remote in, and I can only assume it's because they want to avoid writing it up.

I've seen this too, and it's not just in academia.  These people are making it out into the wild and getting jobs where they're bringing that same inability to communicate basic concepts with them.

At my last job, one of my techs had a user who literally could not read an error message to him, despite it being right in front of the user.  This wasn't wilfulness on the user's behalf: when asked what the message read, the user would reply with something along the lines of, "I don't understand it."  It was as though they couldn't separate their ability to read something from their inability to comprehend what it was they were reading - and this problem was not unique to this user.

We noticed that this problem seemed to be pooled (mostly) in an age range that was within college-leaving age to about five or six years above that.  The closer the timeline was to graduation, the wider the spread of the issue.

I graduated from college in 2013 and I did not have those sorts of problems. Students these days... lol