Employer unhappiness with college graduates is nothing new. As the president of the University of Washington, Michael K. Young, told me recently, "employers have never been happy with the graduates colleges are producing."
Still, with three million unfilled jobs in a bad economy, it stands to reason that some employers are having difficulty finding the right workers.
In the past few months, at conferences, at dinners, and on airplanes, I've had the chance to sit next to a handful of recruiters who work for companies large and small, from Zappos to United Technologies. So I asked these recruiters if colleges were indeed graduating unprepared students.
Their answers were a lot more nuanced than a simple yes or no. They had plenty of blame to spread around, including at their own corporations, which have largely pared back training and mentoring programs in the name of saving money in recent years.
Still, a few common themes emerged from the conversations:
Some students are not college material even with a college degree. Few employers seem to be worried about the top graduates of almost any college or any of the graduates of the top colleges in the United States. But all of the recruiters told me they were surprised by the number of applicants they encounter who clearly were not ready to go to college in the first place, yet possess a degree.
"The focus on access and completion has come at a real cost," one recruiter told me (he didn't want his company identified because he's not allowed to speak on its behalf). "We're encouraging students to go to college who should be considering other options, and then we're pushing them through once there."
Writing, writing, writing. We keep throwing around the word "skills," but it seems the one skill that almost every job requires is the ability to write well, and too many graduates are lacking in that area. That's where many of the recruiters were quick to let colleges off the hook, for the most part. Students are supposed to learn to write in elementary and secondary school. They're not forgetting how to write in college. It's clear they're not learning basic grammar, usage, and style in K-12.
Work ethic. Again, many of the recruiters refused to paint today's college student with the broad brush of laziness. Many students, they said, come armed with impressive credentials and are hard workers. But many others were allowed to skate by in college. The recruiters complained about professors who clearly gave grades that were not deserved, allowed assignments to be skipped, and simply didn't demand much from their students. The lack of academic rigor might please students and their parents while in college, but it's doing a disservice to students when they graduate and have similar expectations in the workplace.
Expectations. Speaking of expectations, many of today's younger workers want everything now and have a sense of entitlement. "They're often unprepared for the first test on the job, the interview. They expect to just get the job," one recruiter told me. Several recruiters blamed that attitude on a generation of parents obsessed with their kids' happiness, which has made them unhappy and impatient in adulthood.
As you can see, literally everyone is to blame for this supposed lack of prepared graduates in the workplace. So if we think this is a problem, everyone, it seems, must play a part in fixing it, including colleges.
Perhaps we should be encouraging more students to hold off on going directly to college from high school, or have them consider alternatives to a college degree. Colleges and professors need to uphold their standards and encourage more rigor in the classroom, knowing the short-term consequences might be unhappy students but the long-term benefits will be better-prepared graduates.
The fixes for K-12 and parents are more difficult, but the bottom line is that the debate over what employers want in today's college graduates is about more than just job training vs. a broad education.
Follow Jeff Selingo on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jselingo
But the point that the author makes is good. The students from the leading universities are well prepared as are the leading students at other institutions. Unfortunately, it appears that the same cannot be said for many of the students at secondary institutions and at less demanding majors. This is a problem, and is indeed the problem they were complaining of.
It was less of a problem 40 years ago - the schools expected to flunk out most of the students - and did. The ones who survived were, on the average, quite competent. Now many of the marginal students manage to graduate.
'three million unfilled jobs in a bad economy'
a) where is this figure coming from?
b) the sum total of hiring and firing is dynamic not static, no matter the state of the economy there will always be positions opening.
The relevant questions are: How does this compare, both percentage and in absolute terms, to the number of positions open in better times? How long have these positions been unfilled? What industries and geographic areas are we talking about?
The author provides none of the necessary details, so what is there to talk about?
Letting colleges off easy for students' poor writing skills... blame it on K-12. One might just as easily say 'blame it on the admissions committee' or 'blame it on admin for not demanding/providing remedial coursework' or 'blame it on students for not applying themselves'.
Perpetuating the notion that the unemployment rate is somehow the fault of an inadequate workforce is not helpful. It is just more propaganda. Perhaps if the author would meet with someone other that corporate HR executives, a better understanding of the situation could occur.
Bingo. You can point fingers at entitled Millennials all you want, but the bottom line is that companies have not just "pared back" training programs--they are non-existent. College is meant to provide general skills like writing, critical thinking, analysis, etc. It is not meant to provide fully trained individuals to meet the specific requirements of specific business models unless you're training to become a CPA, and even then I'm sure every accounting firm has their own internal system. Every company has their own way of doing things. It is incumbent upon them to train their workers in the manner in which they see fit.
I think the private sector needs to put up or shut up.
===
I don't think we can tell anything from the number of available jobs at any given time. It's not the same three million jobs all the time. And further, do those three million jobs all require college graduates who paid attention in class? Given that most of the recent job growth has been in the sub-$15/hour category, I'd say no.
It's undoubtedly true that more people are graduating college without being as prepared as people who graduated in the 70s. On the other hand, so many more people are going to college these days, so as a percentage of the population, the number of prepared college graduates probably hasn't changed much.
Anything and everything can always be improved, of course, but the real problem isn't bad workers. That's downright offensive. The real problem is a lack of jobs. If employers were really having a hard time filling open positions, you'd see salaries in those positions rising. But they're not rising.