Writing 1+ page essays and MLA citation formatting is work that seems to only exist in academia. It wouldn't surprise me if community college educated people transferring to university programs needed a refresher on that stuff.
Proper written communication and literature searching skills are demanded everywhere in the workplace. Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?
I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum. Granted, much of high school and regional college is piss-poor, but instead of writing off all of university as useless one should demand proper performance.
Proper written communication, absolutely. However, you can argue that people don't need 4 years of writing essays in order to comprise emails or PowerPoints. As for literature searching, what does that mean in a normal office environment context?
Footnoting means to put stuff into proper context. Of course you need literature searching skills to put stuff into proper context, and you need to know where to find documentation for your field of work.
I'm getting deja vu:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23496234
Seems the experience is very different in differing work places.
> Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?
This is the norm at my (very successful and large) company.
> I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum.
I'm very pro-education, but I will point out that all the people I know who write very poorly have formal education, and often graduate degrees. Culture will dictate how well you write much, much more than education. If the work culture doesn't value it, people will write poorly.