Volume I: Kids These Days!

Once again, thank you for joining me on our weekly blog. Today, I’m launching a series entitled “Why Modern Graduate Students are Nothing Like Their Parents’ Generation.” The generation gap in learning is an amusing and sometimes confounding subject. I assure you, I’m not here to pass judgment on one era over the other, but rather to consider what happens when someone from my generation, for example, coaches or teaches someone born in 1995.

The Old School

Those of you who are closer to my age remember a time when education was a world away: We did our research at a library, typically with a card catalog or a printed index; we typed our papers on typewriters and used correction fluid for mistakes; we attended school in a physical classroom and a physical laboratory almost without exception, and we read huge, heavy, ponderous textbooks—a lot of them. And if we didn’t have the answer to a question, we had to pursue it like Sherlock Holmes pursued a suspect.

We experience an educational divide between digital-era students and faculty members educated in previous decades, though not because “we don’t get it.” That’s far from true; most “old school” types have made an impressive leap into the digital age. The real difference is not what tools you have on your desk, but what tools you have in your mind. These generations have learned “how to learn” in a vastly different way, and it’s a gap that must be bridged to be effective teachers, coaches, and students.

Medical graduate programs feel this disconnect acutely, as established teaching methodologies often struggle to meet the expectations of students who have existed solely in a world of immediate information accessibility. The gap represents a difference in technological familiarity and a deeper divergence in learning philosophy and knowledge acquisition patterns.

Let’s look at some statistics: Our contemporary student body demonstrates different priorities and constraints—25% select online learning options for adaptability, and 35% pursue their degrees part-time. Further highlighting this transformation, international first-time graduate enrollment has climbed by 10.2%, while domestic enrollment has fallen by 4.7%. Such statistics paint a picture of fundamental change in both who seeks advanced education and how they engage with it.

The More Things Change…

In the decades I’ve spent coaching graduate medical students, the problems they experience haven’t changed much. Students who need Success Coaching struggle with a combination of time management issues and the amount of material they must remember. No matter what generation I’m coaching, that core balancing act really doesn’t change.

What changes predictably, and about every 2-3 years, are the amount and the power of technology that these students grew up with. Technology's constantly evolving availability and sophistication mean that we repeatedly encounter groups of graduate students who think about learning differently. If it hasn’t happened already, we’ll soon be accepting applications from students who attended high school during the COVID-19 pandemic that kept them home from school for the better part of a school year. While we rapidly switched to working and learning from home, quarantining brought sweeping changes in our world's operations.

Can we bridge the gap?

We, their instructors, can learn the new tech, and love it or hate it, but fundamentally, many of us “learned how to learn” differently. I often think about this when coaching students who are arguing with me about reading textbooks. They would rather seek answers online by asking an AI bot to fetch. They tell me, “I want the most current information.” I respond, “The most current information is in your textbook. And it’s the information you need to know to pass this class.” Imagine the look on my face when they eventually report to me how useful their textbook was.

Metacognition—our ability to understand how we learn—is a key component of our Student Success Coaching model. A critical facet of the process is for coaches to understand that these younger students do not view the learning process in quite the same way as previous generations. Even younger coaches, who grew up with an easily accessible, dynamic Internet, may not have the complete picture of the drastic differences brought about by the explosion of AI.

Therefore, I’d like to spend the following few blogs examining how “learning how to learn” has changed. Next week, we’ll discuss how today’s medical graduate students think differently from those who came just a generation before. I hope you’ll join me then!