The socialization of this class of college graduates is getting harder and harder

True Story Plan

2024-05-06 17:41Published in Beijing, creators in the field of documentary

The socialization of this class of college graduates is getting harder and harder

A young man with one or two anxious parents wanders through the sea of job fairs. Such scenes are appearing frequently in the past year or two. A group of "socialized failed college students" are entering society, showing worrying psychological qualities and interpersonal skills.

Universities are supposed to be important places to help individuals socialize. However, in the past two years, both students themselves, university teachers, and employers have discovered a significant problem: college graduates who spend their university life in isolation have not had time to grow up, and they have hurriedly graduated into society, becoming unfinished people who are out of touch with society.

Fresh graduates who have failed in socialization

In the corridor of the hotel where more than 60 graduates are waiting for interviews, a middle-aged man with half-white hair catches the eye of all the young people.

A minute or two later, a boy in a neat suit appeared next to the man, looking to be in his twenties, young and shy. Li Gang (pseudonym), who had just graduated, knew that the middle-aged man was not a job seeker recruited by the society, nor was he a retired re-employed person, but the father of this young boy. During the whole process of the father's help with the boy's registration, the boy barely spoke.

After a while, two women emerged from behind the boy, his mother and sister. Mom is holding her resume, and my sister is carrying a schoolbag and a water glass. The father looked around and asked the staff, how long is the son's turn?

The family of four who appeared at the interview scene made the air in the corridor freeze for half a second. Li Gang saw that when the boy was interviewing in the interview room, his three family members stuck their heads into the open door from time to time to watch. In the hallway, a girl who had just graduated from graduate school couldn't help but comment: "If you live in a greenhouse, what if the greenhouse is not heated one day?"

A young man, with one or more anxious family members, cruising the sea of job fairs like a dolphin family. Such scenes are appearing frequently in the past year or two. An interviewer found that the mother accompanied the child to the interview and asked what the situation was, but the other party only said, "Don't worry". Some HR complained, "The fresh graduates took their parents for an interview, and their parents kept talking, but I didn't say much." "When the labor contract is signed, the parents wearing reading glasses read the terms sentence by sentence before the children fill it out.

In the past one or two years, employers who have come into contact with job seekers have become more and more aware of encountering a group of "fresh graduates who have failed socialization". Socialization refers to the process by which humans learn various social norms and gradually adapt to them. Ideally, socialization connects the individual to society. A socially successful individual can access the society like a USB flash drive, find his own position in the society, smoothly play various social roles, and realize personal value.

However, some of the graduates of this class are entering society in a state where they cannot access society.

In an interview with a department leader, an HR asked a young man looking for a job a question about his major, only to see that the other party began to cry after a moment of silence. After the cold show, HR tried to change his question and asked the young man, what advantages do you think you have?After stammering a few words, the young man suddenly burst into tears. Everyone present panicked, and in the following time, the interviewers could only comfort the young man.

Li Yifei (pseudonym), a 20-level undergraduate student in the Japanese department of a university in Beijing, also felt difficulties in applying for a job as a fresh graduate in 2024. She was trying to get a regular job in an in-person internship, but found it difficult to adapt to the work environment. Any communication with the department leader about the content of the work often brings mental stress to her. The leader's revision of the work also made her doubt herself, believing that she was completely unsuitable for the industry. After a few months of internship, she felt that her physical and mental state was getting worse and worse, and "the power of life seemed to be sucked away".

This is the second internship for fresh graduate Li Yifei. After entering the school in 2020, she spent most of her campus time in a closed campus, and her life was occupied by online classes and health tests. In her sophomore and junior years, when she should go out of school for internships and establish connections with society, she took online classes in the dormitory, lying in bed most of the time, and the few physical activities she did were to open the curtains to see the weather today.

Psychologist Erik Homburger Erikson's theory of stages of psychosocial development divides a person's life development into eight stages. Children who have gone through the infant, toddler, and childhood stages usher in the fifth stage of adolescence at the age of 12~18. At this stage, adolescents need to think about their place in society, form their own life strategies, and socialize from minors to adults. Once the goal of socialization is successful, they grow up to be adults who "know their place in society" and "have the inner self-confidence to be able to get the recognition they expect from the outside." Then, in the early adulthood of 18~30 years old, they should learn to establish intimate relationships on the premise of finding a strong self, and become "loving and hard-working people".

Universities are supposed to be important places to help individuals socialize. However, in the past two years, both students, university teachers, and employers have found a significant problem: fresh graduates who have graduated from centrally managed high schools and spent their university life in isolation have not had time to grow up.

Some college graduates did not even complete the goal set by Erikson at the age of 12~18, so they hurriedly graduated into society, failed socialization, and became people who could not love and could not work.

An airtight life

The degree of awareness of autonomy is one of the key criteria for human socialization, which means that people who are socialized successfully should know what they want, be able to make independent decisions, and take responsibility for their own decisions.

But in recent years, the line between college students and adults has become increasingly blurred. Both schools and parents are beginning to tighten their intervention and control over students to prevent them from making autonomous decisions.

Before this May Day holiday, colleges and universities in Jiangsu, Sichuan and other places issued notices, prohibiting students from "organizing group tours without permission" and "suggesting traveling with their families" during the holidays. The notice explained that this was for security reasons.

Many college teachers have also observed that more and more parents will pull a parent group after their children are enrolled, even if their children have been admitted to 985 universities, parents are not at ease, and will pull groups to inquire about Baoyan by themselves. College students under the shadow of airtight guardianship are also prone to become passive and have a weak sense of autonomy.

Towards graduation in her senior year, Li Yifei found that her roommate also did not have the ability to make independent decisions. One of the students finally chose to leave Beijing to take the civil service exam in Northeast China, and the important reason was that he didn't want to be too far away from home. When there is a change in work and life, she will call her parents to discuss.

When discussing with his parents, his parents also said that they were not at ease when studying abroad was too far away from home, and hoped that their children would still be admitted to graduate school in China. The roommate decided to listen to his parents and take the exam for another year.

These students who are unable to make their own decisions are often also the "good kids" in college, the most obedient and the most praised type. "Good child" is the type we have always admired in our education before college. However, in recent years, university education has also begun to produce more and more such involuntary people.

On the days of online classes, Li Yifei felt like a ghost without a soul. She got up at 8 a.m. and hung up in the conference room, and when the Japanese teacher randomly asked the students to translate a sentence in Japanese, she would turn on the translator and search for it. In the teaching session other than the teacher's questions, she was always dazed and tired, feeling that the teacher was as weak as herself, and she fell asleep accidentally.

There were signs of such a ghostly day long before the school was closed. When she was a freshman, Li Yifei found that the teacher of the Japanese major class would initiate an endorsement test once a week. Every Wednesday evening at 8 p.m., 14 students from the Japanese Department come to the conference room. On a long table in the room, the teacher and teaching assistant sat at one end, and the students who came to endorse sat on the other. There are also sofas, tables and chairs scattered around the long table, and the remaining students will wait in line. One by one, 14 people stepped forward to recite a 2-page text, and each person spent 5~10 minutes. After memorizing, the assistant church will score it, and if you get a low score, you will have to memorize the previous week's text again when you memorize the new text next Wednesday.

Endorsement has become a basic requirement for professional compulsory courses, and if you want to get a high score, you must follow the rules. Li Yifei is surrounded by people who decided to study as early as their freshman year, and they will maintain a very regular schedule, go to the classroom to study at seven or eight o'clock in the morning, sleep only four or five hours a day, and write an 800-word essay three times by themselves before submitting it, just to get a higher score.

After a year of studying like this, Li Yifei began to have doubts about college life, "It's too much like high school, and I can't stand this kind of study." Li Yifei studied the school's research program and found that if you want to study insurance, you also need to participate in a variety of school services, such as doing work in the college department, and you can finally add 1 point to the total score of the research institute for one year, which is more than many people. After working for a while, Li Yifei found that this job was only to publicize and sort out materials for the school, and it was difficult to accumulate social experience. ”

Under normal circumstances, students who find that they are not suitable for the postgraduate examination can also expand their development dimension and establish their own career path through internships, entrepreneurship and other means. Since 2020, many universities have been closed. The already scarce access to society was cut off, and many of the students who failed to accumulate practical experience failed to attend the course, leaving only a blank resume like a brain.

By the time they returned to normal life in their junior year, Li Yifei and her classmates found that they only had the road to choose from in graduate school, graduate school entrance examination, and public entrance examination, because they missed the best internship period in online classes and school closures, and with their current resume and course arrangement, it was difficult for them to find internships in the market and find a place in society.

After the school relaxed its control in March 2023, Li Yifei had the opportunity to leave the school. She spent a month squatting on the news of five internship groups every day, submitting dozens of resumes, but she couldn't find her first internship. She knew it was because of her blank resume. She had to make a breakthrough in school and spend three months participating in entrepreneurial projects to fill her resume. Regarding entrepreneurship, the school did not provide much guidance, and on the road from the dormitory to the teaching building, Li Yifei only saw lectures and academic knowledge sharing such as "Civil Service Examination Strategy" for a long time.

She didn't know what the real workplace was like, and she didn't have any more avenues to learn about the business world.

Without access to social connections, without the time to discover oneself and the conditions for becoming oneself, college becomes another transition period after high school, bound to meritocracy, the only way. In the closed campus, students can only chase grades and scores to rush to the next exam after the college entrance examination. Socialization difficulties have become an inevitable result.

People to be done

Li Yifei feels that the university does not provide enough resources and support for students who want to explore multiple pathways. This creates a paradox: "If a person has been studying hard and taking online classes according to the system prescribed by the campus, she will not actually be able to find her first internship." If you want to work hard to improve yourself and enter the society, you have to take a part of the time occupied by the system prescribed by the campus and do it yourself. ”

The social environment that advocates the entrance examination and the system of guaranteeing graduate school with extremely high requirements for grade points conspires to squeeze out the energy and time of college students for self-exploration, and make them lose their leisure. The disconnect between university training programs and the needs of society, coupled with the lack of career guidance, has led to the emergence of college students who are unable to enter society.

According to the "2023 China Undergraduate Employment Report" released by an institution, among those who are still engaged in major-related work after graduating from undergraduate, 59% of the 2022 graduates think that the internship and practical links are insufficient, and 36% think that the course content is not practical or outdated. According to a study, only 5.68% of the 158 universities in 27 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities in China have full-time career guidance staff.

For the online class generation, the winners in the system have become learning professionals, far away from concrete life, and live abstractly in books. People who don't adapt to the system don't have access to professional skills inside or outside the school to connect with the market. The closed campus life has brought to the fore the existing problems of university education and management, and accelerated it to an extreme.

Li Yifei feels that in recent years, universities have become a manufacturing factory for a single type of student, only one kind of person is encouraged and protected, and the rest of the paths are always truncated or denied. The environment of the university is increasingly less supportive of students exploring, discovering, and being themselves.

"People who want to actively explore themselves are not in a particularly good situation, but those who learn machines are in a better situation. They cater to the rules and get grade points and extra points. They don't need to enter the society, and they don't need to be in line with the society, the school will give such a person a lot of affirmation, and he will be like a fish in water in the school system. In recent years, the brothers and sisters who are employed and started businesses around them have gradually turned to civil servants and work within the system, "The situation of people is not good, the situation of machines is good, and finally people are also pushed to machines, which is the result of social encouragement." ”

Gan Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University, also said in a recent interview that "universities are becoming more and more like factories, and faculties are like production workshops". "University Factory Theory" rushed to the hot search in March and sparked a discussion, "(Universities) are not cultivating people, but cultivating learning machines, which is the reason why college students are unhappy." "Goal-oriented indicators occupy the golden years of young people. Gan Yang has "understanding sympathy" for this, and believes that students should not be blamed for "refined egoism", but should reflect on what kind of environment modern universities have created for young people.

During the lockdown, the spirit of university students also shrank with the physical space, from society to campus, from campus to dormitory, and finally closed behind the bed curtain, becoming atomized people. After the end of the school lockdown, the impenetrable management of the school, the excessive intervention of the family, the meritocracy of the society that promotes a single path, and the lack of career guidance and skills training in the university education continue to besiege the unsocialized college students.

When they are deprived of the avenue of self-exploration, young people lose the motivation to continue exploring and miss the best opportunity. The path of life gets narrower and narrower, and in the end, there is only one left. Young people waiting to "go ashore" graduate students and civil servants lined up and burned the sundial. In the eyes of teachers and employers, these students who go ashore, even if they are excellent, are unhappy, have no independent spirit, and are stagnant in the unfinished people.

Affected by the closure of the university, most of the undergraduate students who have enrolled in recent years have lived a closed life without any connection to society during the four years of college. Under normal circumstances, they should go into the classroom during these four years, receive general and professional education, and establish their own views and six theories. They should also enrich their social skills in various club activities, be exposed to multiple life paths, and explore their multiple possibilities. Based on the campus, they should also initially connect with the society and see a corner of the real world in off-campus practice, volunteer activities, internships and other paths. Many people will make the most important friends in their lives and build intimate relationships at university, and some people will have the ability to make independent decisions in internships, entrepreneurship, and research projects.

In reality, these college students have no connection with offline life, are far away from daily life, and are unable to connect with the outside world. Recalling her college life, one of the few happy memories of Li Yifei is just sitting by the empty classroom window, looking at the green trees outside the window and studying silently. The classroom capacity was originally 80 people, but after the opening of the room, only 1-2 people sat down. But compared to the life of hanging online classes on the bed in the dormitory, such daily life is scarce and rare.

After graduating from college in four years, Li Yifei felt that she had "lost her vitality". When she first entered the school as a freshman, she looked forward to "doing something", and she would not feel particularly tired when walking 10 kilometers during military training. "But after four years, I didn't accomplish anything in college, I didn't have any positive feedback, and my personal development stalled. ”

Disappointment has lasted so long that it has become a habit. She felt like she was in a downward elevator, and if she wanted to climb up, she would have to fight the downward gravitational pull. There are fewer and fewer paths to success, and there are only a few ways left to take the postgraduate entrance examination. The people in the orbit fly upward, while the self outside the orbit falls downward, becoming more and more confused.

In the second internship that was hard to find as a fresh graduate, Li Yifei subconsciously felt that she had become a "student" every time she encountered denial.

"The word student is a protective color. She knew that the closed school and the social environment had provided some kind of protection to herself when she was deprived of opportunities. But she also knew that she had to overcome the gravitational pull of being protected and devote herself to society.

"Throw yourself into it first. Although you are miserable, although you are not adaptable, you have to go into society to exercise your abilities, not stay in books. Fearful, she sought courage and decided to rest for a moment and then push herself forward, without looking back.

* At the request of the interviewee, the information about the characters in the article is vague

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Written by Fontaine

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