And I have written so many times that that claim is most probably not true.

Long time ago, you played with the military and got to see the best students. Not anymore. But you assume that the desperate people who run around looking for job are representative, while missing that the best people probably had their job fixed before they even graduated.

The big and interesting companies/organizations are actively head-hunding students. And students who don't get head-hunted often decide to look for work in bigger companies where they can progress up through the organization until they reach the limit of their (in)competence. So people looking for job with small employers are often the more desperate ones - don't assume that they are representative of "todays students".

Look at the second answer "The trouble with youngsters today..." at
http://askville.amazon.com/Speech-Yo...Id=5088801

The complains about youth en masse is the sign of someone who have gotten old, and forgotten what life once was.
In reality, individual people can be very lazy, stupid, ... but humanity will not suddenly change in intelligence in just a couple of tens of years. It's the view of the observer that is changing during these years. Yes, Richard. It's your view that is slowly drifting.

The only really troubling thing, when talking about students, is that the student/school interrelation hasn't had time to adapt fully to a world with Internet. It doesn't make students more stupid, but some students gets into serious trouble because the school fails to make them aware of the difference between learning something and understand it, and being able to google for a magic turn-key solution. So we get lots of students trying to use web forums to cheat on their school work. That is a conceptual problem that will probably be reduced when the school system have adapted and most of the teachers are also born into the internet world. To a big part, it's a failure of school. A teacher needs more experience than a student to be able to do a good job - so what happens when teachers have lacking experience with Internet? After all - we existing developers do our work differently now than 20 years ago because of Internet. So it's reasonable that school classes should also adapt.