I spent 20 years dealing with college students, and generally they got worse year over year. Covid absolutely ruined a entire cohort of students, even now many complain about wanting to go back to online only.

After being done with academia, I went into government. I'm in a consulting position, stuck between the intractable appointees of the elected officials, and the poor, rather outmatched senior civil servants. The work the department I'm investigating in saves the government tens of millions of dollars per year that would otherwise be spent on dealing with the shit that would happen if this department didn't exist. My job is to make them more "efficient". They're already overworked (average workload per employee is about 40% greater than designed, which results in worse outcomes, employee burnout), they've seen a LOT of turnover in recent years and keep hiring and training new people (the training alone costs over $10,000 per employee), and these new people don't reach baseline proficiency for about 2 years. In the meantime, they burden their supervisors with demands for help, clarification, etc.

The government has decided to play hardball in contract negotiations, so their wages - already eroded by inflation - are going to stay flat for most likely the next 3-4 years unless their union caves. Now, many of the new employees they've trained, facing the full burdens of the job, earning less (after inflation) than they expected, are quitting within anywhere from a few months to a couple of years on the job. So this requires more hiring and training.

Meanwhile, the people who hired me as a consultant, like I said, are appointees of elected (conservative) officials who refuse to take my findings at face value and insist I'm missing something, to do more research, to find "efficiencies" (i.e., "can we add more work per employee?" "can we move training online?" "can we cut staff?") so they can spend not on this department that does preventative work, but on a department whose work caters to their base and costs far more in fixing/managing the problems that result when the department I'm investigating fails.