The Ignorance Of Today's College Students Shouldn't Surprise Us

What did our students learn during this holiday break between college semesters?  Once finals were over, many probably went to see a movie or took a trip with their family.  What did they discover about this rich nation that will give them so many chances to succeed in life

If they saw The Wolf of Wall Street they learned that businesspeople love cocaine, have orgies on airplanes, and use of the f-word excessively. In fact, Scorsese’s new film now holds the record for the most the f-bombs dropped in any American film.  If they saw Saving Mr. Banks they learned that Walt Disney was not just Chief Executive Officer but Chief Therapeutic Officer as well.  Businesspeople, in the Hollywood imagination, are either sinister and greedy or something other than a businessperson – an eccentric, an inventor, or a therapist.  If you own a business, serving customers isn’t what makes you good, and it may make you bad—like the corrupt businesspeople in The Wolf of Wall Street.

If these same students traveled across America, perhaps they drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, across the Washington Bridge, or on the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.  The people they saw our nation memorialize were invariably the politicians who spent the money generated by the entrepreneurs who built the cars the students drove or the restaurants in which they ate.  Where, then, are the monuments to American entrepreneurs?

Students everywhere seem to be ignorant of American business. “Who was America’s first billionaire?” “Who was the founder of Wal-Mart?”  “What phrase do the letters IBM represent?”  We asked these and other questions on American business to hundreds of college students in 2005 and again in 2013.   Both of our schools, Baylor University and Hillsdale College, are sympathetic to free market ideas.  Yet the students’ ignorance of American business was astonishing.

Most students thought Bill Gates, not John D. Rockefeller, was our nation’s first billionaire.  More students correctly identified Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s female Shoshone guide, than either Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen or Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. More students knew the capitol of North Dakota (Bismarck) than the name of Walt Disney’s first full-length, animated feature film (Snow White and the Seven Dwarves).  Far more students knew that EPA stood for “Environmental Protection Agency” than knew that IBM stood for “International Business Machines” or that AT&T stood for “American Telephone & Telegraph”  Furthermore, the EPA recognition score increased almost 5% between 2005 and 2013.


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