Google is now the go-to teacher for adults who need help — with basic ‘adulting'
Now more than ever, adults are looking to Google for help with their day-to-day life skills, Axios reported.
As millennials and Gen Z are moving into adulthood, they're not asking mom or dad for help on basic skills that their elders may have learned in home economics classes or from their parents and grandparents — they're asking Google instead.
According to data from the search engine, queries for things such as 'how to use a mop,' 'how to set up autopay,' 'how to do oil change' and 'how to clean bathroom vent' have reached an all-time high this year.
Previous studies and surveys have shown that adults often don't know basic home maintenance or car care — perhaps because classes like home ec that train students in practical life skills, such as sewing or managing finances, are decreasing across the country.
According to the American Association of Family & Consumer Sciences, less than a third of American high-school students take a class similar to home economics.
'NYC high schools are failing their students — not academically, but practically,' New York City 10th-grader Zack Leitner wrote in The Post last month.
'Until the 1960s, NYC high schoolers learned to cook, clean and sew as part of their standard curriculum. In 2025, they'd be lucky if they knew how to do their laundry.'
But it's not just Google that people are turning to — YouTube, TikTok and AI chatbots are getting lots of questions as well.
Pew Research data found that by 2018, more than half of YouTube users in the U.S. admitted to using the platform for 'figuring out how to do things they haven't done before,' which one Reddit user dubbed 'The University of YouTube.'
Especially when it comes to how to clean a home, adults are turning to TikTok, where cleaning trends remain one of the most popular content categories on the platform.
'Sometimes we take for granted that kids know how to wash dishes,' educator Susan Turgeson told NPR in 2018. 'I never thought I was going to have to explain, step by step, how to put the drain plug in, the amount of soap to be used.'
And while adults are increasingly relying on Google to figure life out, they don't necessarily want to.
Gen Z is now flocking to 'Adulting 101' crash courses in a desperate attempt to learn skills that previous generations might call common sense, such as how to do laundry, budgeting for rent or navigating a grocery store — without Google.
Canadian colleges like the University of Waterloo are stepping in to teach the basics with online toolkits like 'Adulting 101,' which covers everything from healthy relationships to how not to set your kitchen on fire.
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The truth is that many professors would like to make this change but simply can't. A lot of us might want to judge students on the merits of their participation in class, but we've been discouraged from doing so out of fear that such evaluations will be deemed arbitrary and inequitable —and that students and their parents might complain. When professors take class participation into account, they do so carefully: Students tend to be graded on whether they show up or on the number of times they speak in class, rather than the quality of what they say. Erin McGlothlin, the vice dean of undergraduate affairs in WashU's College of Arts & Sciences, told me this stems from the belief that grading rubrics should be crystal clear in spelling out how class discussion is evaluated. For professors, this approach avoids the risk of any conflicts related to accommodating students' mental health or politics, or to bureaucratic matters. But it also makes the modern classroom more vulnerable to the incursion of AI. If what a student says in person can't be assessed rigorously, then what they type on their computer—perhaps with automated help—will matter all the more. Like the other members of his class, Lieber did experience a bit of college life before ChatGPT appeared. Even then, he said, at the very start of his freshman year, he felt alienated from some of his introductory classes. 'I would think to myself, What the hell am I doing, sitting watching this professor give the same lecture that he has given every year for the last 30 years? ' But he knew the answer even then: He was there to subsidize that professor's research. At America's research universities, teaching is a secondary job activity, at times neglected by faculty who want to devote as much time as possible to writing grants, running labs, and publishing academic papers. The classroom experience was suffering even before AI came onto the scene. Now professors face their own temptations from AI, which can enable them to get more work done, and faster, just as it does for students. I've heard from colleagues who admit to using AI-generated recommendation letters and course syllabi. Others clearly use AI to write up their research. And still more are eager to discuss the wholesome-seeming ways they have been putting the technology to use—by simulating interactions with historical authors, for example, or launching minors in applied AI. But students seem to want a deeper sort of classroom innovation. They're not looking for gimmicks—such as courses that use AI only to make boring topics seem more current. Students like Lieber, who sees his college education as a means of setting himself up for his career, are demanding something more. Instead of being required to take tests and write in-class essays, they want to do more project-based learning—with assignments that 'emulate the real world,' as Lieber put it. But designing courses of this kind, which resist AI shortcuts, would require professors to undertake new and time-consuming labor themselves. That assignment comes at the worst possible time. Universities have been under systematic attack since President Donald Trump took office in January. Funding for research has been cut, canceled, disrupted, or stymied for months. Labs have laid off workers. Degree programs have cut doctoral admissions. Multi-center research projects have been put on hold. The ' college experience ' that Americans have pursued for generations may soon be over. The existence of these stressors puts higher ed at greater risk from AI. Now professors find themselves with even more demands than they anticipated and fewer ways to get them done. The best, and perhaps the only, way out of AI's college takeover would be to embark on a redesign of classroom practice. But with so many other things to worry about, who has the time? In this way, professors face the same challenge as their students in the year ahead: A college education will be what they
