I finished undergrad last year. Email was a primary means of communication, a key part of all academic, extracurricular, and administrative tasks, and every was expected to (and did) check email multiple times a day. Once, the college cancelled classes due to weather and the tweet about it went out ~20 min before the email and many students got angry. People don't get push notifications from the public twitter account which mostly posts weird "engagement" content. Kids get email pushed to their phone. If they say they didn't get the email or "the attachment must not have gone through" they are probably lying.

To be fair, I went to a small and very professionally oriented college, not a large university. But this article seemed totally made up to me.

Dumb trend piece article alert. How could email possibly be any easier to use? It is one of the simplest, most straightforward communication methods ever devised. If you can't figure out how to write an email, odds are you won't be good at communicating by any other means.

Many people find email painful for exactly the reasons why it is such an important medium. It is the pipeline through which official information flows. Bills, notices from the boss, grades - all of it arrives in our email inbox. If facebook replaced email in our professional lives, suddenly all the fun would be sucked out of it.

As having graduated from a large university and having worked at another one, there are several problems:

- failure to understand customer needs. There is very little feedback considered in most university processes. It's "if you [student] don't like it, too bad." State schools offer on average less hand-holding compared to Ivys and private, which makes some sense.

- failure to share and integrate between departments, giving the appearance of fragmentation and more work for the served affiliates (students, faculty, staff, visitors, etc)

- failure to adapt to modern technologies fast enough. I started with desktop servers connected on public IPs and Apple Newtons, and ended with rack mounted gear in real datacenters behind hardware firewalls. The problem is partly that budget is yearly, top-down, not based on need. Also, most departments are cost-centers, not profit-centers (we were, so we had more leverage to suggest changes). Combine these and you get reactive capabilities devoid of marketplace competition^ that are a year behind the times, at best. Yeah, pretty nuts for a $160 m dept.

^ Our customers (other departments within the same hierarchy) often owned a-la-carte discretionary funding control over our departments' projects, so there was competition because opting for outside vendors would be loss of funding and more integration work.

I'm not sure anything in this article should be taken seriously.

This piece doesn't even seem to meet the journalistic standard of a mediocre high school newspaper, much less the NY Times.

My thoughts: The professors and the writer are the ones out of touch here. Were the professors really gullible enough to think that college students don't check their email regularly?

if a Uni student says things like “I never know what to say in the subject line and how to address the person,” - they probably shouldn't be at university at all.

No.

Doing my matura (sort of like the SAT's) I took advance level English just so I could get away from having to know how to properly write an English letter. I got a 98.5% and to this day (~6 years later) I couldn't tell you how to properly format something that is officially recognised as a Letter.

Email has thrown most of the old rules about addressing people out the door. Nothing I learned in elementary or middle school about written communication is even remotely useful these days. The only times those things even remotely come in to play are when I have to write a formal letter to the government.

And even then I just google the correct format.

How hard is it to form a subject line for an e-mail? It should indicate what's inside the message; there really isn't much to think about here.

> How hard is it to form a subject line for an e-mail? It should indicate what's inside the message

Except if you're sending encrypted e-mails :)

In that regard a colleague and I now use an incrementing integer for the subject, with occasional skips in the sequence.

Well I was taught at 8 or 9 at junior school how to write a basic letter.

These are not people whose second language is English they are native speakers.

>During the semester, they spent an average of 123 minutes a day on a computer, by far the biggest portion of it, 31 minutes, on social networking. The only thing they spent less time on than e-mail: hunting for content via search engines (four minutes).

This one really bugged me out. I would have expected that they would have been using their knowledge tools to access knowledge - which is probably at least 50% of what I do with my smartphone and 70% of what I do on my laptop. Hopefully they are seeking knowledge through other means and aren't just ignoring one of the best advances of all of mankind.

Search engines are designed to get you to bounce to a useful resource quickly. The longer you have to spend on a search engine, the worse it is.

123 - 31 - 4 = 88

I'm guessing those 88 minutes were spent on web sites found through a search engine.

The biggest problem I observed as a student is that sometimes the email solution chosen by the school absolutely sucks. Example: Microsoft Exchange, only accessible through the "simple" web portal interface that's locked down, feature poor, and it's impossible to use IMAP to pull your emails down to another client.

That school ended up emailing students' personal email accounts to get enough responses because the school's official email solution was so terrible.

It is going to be quite a shock when they get their first job and realize the business world runs on email. Assuming they can land one.

They'll have a pretty hard time getting a job if they don't check their e-mail to find out when the appointment for their interview is.

“E-mail has never really been a fun thing to use,” said Ms. Judge, 19. “It’s always like, ‘This is something you have to do.’ School is a boring thing. E-mail is a boring thing. It goes together.”

And if they think that college is boring, wait until they have to sit through their first meeting at work.

>And if they think that college is boring, wait until they have to sit through their first meeting at work.

I was with you until this. Boredom means you are not engaged to your full potential. If the "real world" is even more boring than school, people should be complaining. (And someone should be making a killing on that inefficiency.)

Maybe you will be the one who is very shocked when email goes away and all business takes place on twitter.

I don't get it. Configuring email on your phone should allow you to respond or read them as quickly as a txt. I am pretty sure that an educational institution would have a pretty good email system set up. is it a matter of students not knowing how to configure email on their phones?

Email is the worst way to communicate crucial information, except for all the others.

/Churchill

The only non-anecdotal data in this story appears in a last paragraph and contradicts the thesis.

Can we stop posting articles behind paywalls?

There was a comic not so long ago that had a "why I hate email" complaining that they never know how formal to be.

It is hard to believe that people have become some out of touch with each other that they can't figure out basic social etiquette.

At the same time I hop on Xbox and listen to 8 year olds who swear like sailors and think that is how you talk with other people who are "online". So maybe my surprise at the lack of etiquette is that I'm now 34 and can't relate to people half my age.

The regular death threats from people on Youtube who disagree with my stance on Pasteurized Milk should possibly also have been a clue.

I have changed my mind I'm just deluded. Young people have no clue how to interact anymore. (Hey you kids get off my yard)

> It is hard to believe that people have become some out of touch with each other that they can't figure out basic social etiquette.

We haven't. But I think society is currently going through a change in basic social etiquette.

Just like when Shakespeare was alive, English still had a formal and informal "you" (you is the formal, thou the informal if I'm not mistaken). These days an esteemed professor might respond to a long and formally addressed email with "yup".

I've had it happen.

Also, it used to be normal for friends to sign letters with things like "Forever yours and eternally devoted, with love, ~Swizec"

Nowadays ... not so much.

> Just like when Shakespeare was alive, English still had a formal and informal "you" (you is the formal, thou the informal if I'm not mistaken).

"you" was the plural and "thou" the singular, and, as is the case in several other languages, tradition was to use the plural in formal contexts (sort of the second-person equivalent of the "royal 'we'".)