A new study seeking to measure the overall competency of age groups throughout the globe has found that American Millennials are without a doubt the least skilled population in the world.
The ETS study tested individuals aged 16 to 65 across 23 countries, and measured Literacy, Numeracy, and “problem-solving in technology-rich environments.” Across the board American Millennials scored a ‘feeble wet fart’ on the competency scale when compared with their foreign counterparts. Long thought to be the most technologically savvy and educated generation in history, American Millennials (people aged 16-34) just can’t hack it when it comes to the skills employers are looking for.
Japan crushed it, but there was no indication as to whether or not the Japanese culture’s infatuation with tentacle porn had any bearing on workplace competency.
Here are some key findings from the ETS study:
- In literacy, U.S. millennials scored lower than 15 of the 22 participating countries. Only millennials in Spain and Italy had lower scores.
- In numeracy (ability to apply math to everyday situations), U.S. millennials ranked last, along with Italy and Spain.
- In PS-TRE (problem solving in a technology rich environment), U.S. millennials also ranked last, along with the Slovak Republic, Ireland, and Poland.
- The youngest segment of the U.S. millennial cohort (16- to 24-year-olds), who could be in the labor force for the next 50 years, ranked last in numeracy along with Italy and among the bottom countries in PS-TRE. In literacy, they scored higher than their peers in Italy and Spain.
- Top-scoring U.S. millennials (those at the 90th percentile) scored lower than top-scoring millennials in 15 of the 22 participating countries, and only scored higher than their peers in Spain.
- Low-scoring U.S. millennials (those at the 10th percentile) ranked last along with Italy and England/Northern Ireland and scored lower than millennials in 19 participating countries.
- Although a greater percentage of young adults in the U.S. are attaining higher levels of education since 2003, the numeracy scores of U.S. millennials whose highest level of education is high school and above high school have declined.
- U.S. millennials with a four-year bachelor’s degree scored higher in numeracy than their counterparts in only two countries: Poland and Spain.
To summarize: American Millennials are the overall worst generation in the world when it comes to useful skills. Even if American Millennials didn’t finish dead last in EVERY SINGLE CATEGORY, they managed to finish at or near the bottom across the board.
Now I’m still a little confused as to how American Millennials shit the bed so hard on this one. I even took some of the practice questions (you can take the whole test here) and found them to be pretty damn easy…So what gives?
ETS, the firm who administered the test, is based out of Princeton, New Jersey. That threw out my idea that maybe there was a cultural bias in the test. So for now I’m going to just watch this video below on repeat while I sit around and try and come up with any logical explanation as to why American Millennials failed so hard compared to our global counterparts: