Are graduates weaker?

There is a throwaway line in Chris Barron’s interview of Claudelle von Eck (Something rotten in corporate SA) that I would suggest begs a little unpacking.

This appears to have been a wide-ranging interview, with some castigation of shareholders who should have been applying their minds to their responsibilities (the Companies Act does not assign any such responsibilities to shareholders, but perhaps Von Eck was referring to asset managers).

We’re sternly warned at the start of the article that private-sector corruption may be “quite a bit worse than we think”, but are comforted at the end of the page with the assurance that “the vast majority of business leaders are good”.

The throwaway line occurs in the middle of all this, when apparent ineffectiveness of the internal audit function is ascribed in part to “a decline in the quality of university graduates”. I looked in vain in the comments section below the article for a torrent of disagreement from the heads of the accounting departments of our universities.

Have we now reached the stage as a country where we meekly accept that the graduates of our universities are less well-equipped for the workplace and society than their predecessors?

Perhaps this is a line of inquiry Barron may wish to pursue further.

Gary Cundill Edenglen