"As the price of college has skyrocketed and tens of thousands of recent graduates have found themselves on the unemployment line or stuck in jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, higher education has come under attack for its failure to make students job-ready. Adding fuel to the debate is a series of what seem to be monthly surveys showing a wide gap between what employers want out of today’s college graduates and what schools are producing.
It all begs the question: Is it solely a college’s responsibility to make students job-ready?" …
In his view, employers always have been unhappy with newly minted college graduates. The difference now is that we just survey them more frequently…While he’s rethinking his own university, Roth said others are not without blame for the perceived disconnect between college and the workforce. Employers are less willing to take chances on graduates without narrowly tailored majors. And while Roth’s father thought it was fine to drive a cab after college, parents these days — especially from more affluent families — have sometimes unreasonable expectations for what their children can do directly out of school.
Add students to that, too. In my opinion, college provides a foundation - a BA is supposed to be a signal that you can think critically, analyze and synthesize large amounts of information, communicate clearly (verbally and in written communication), solve relatively complex problems and - probably most important - absorb new information. With few exceptions, bachelor’s degrees were never intended to prepare you for a specific job; employers are supposed to train you in what they want you to do. You hire someone who has the foundation and skills to learn what you want them to learn and then you invest time and resources in helping them learning, knowing that they will make you back that money several times over.
Now employers don’t want to spend the time and resources; they only want to pay if you if you already know how to do exactly what they want, preferably if you’ve already done the exact same thing (same title and everything) at a different organization. Hence the rise of the unpaid internship. On another forum we were discussing this a few days ago, and many said that in their fields, “entry-level jobs” have started asking for 1-3 years of experience and have come to mean “entry-level at our organization, but not to the field/job.”
And the flip side, but (probably partially because of this increasing emphasis on skills and internships) college students are expecting more and more from their first jobs. They expect to go into a job where they already know how to do what they need, not a stretch position. And they expect to be better compensated and have perhaps a greater measure of autonomy than a new college grad can expect out of a first job.
Anyway, I don’t think that employers are any more dissatisfied with new college graduates than they have ever been, just like Millennials aren’t any worse a generation than their parents and grandparents were. Every generation moans and groans about the ones after them. We just have the Internet so you can hear every nuance of the groaning.
A lot of that is probably tied to the rise of ad hoc/contract work. It’s hard from the employer’s perspective to justify spending a lot of time training someone that they are only hiring for three months, who they may never see again and who may end up taking those skills over to a competitor immediately afterwards. Part of this is by their own design of course (no one told them that they had to rely on contractors for their core business) but I can see why businesses find the notion of employees who are perfect at their jobs “out of the box” appealing.
Back in the day, when you were hiring someone possibly for life, it made a lot more sense to invest a lot in them because you knew that you would get it back. Nowadays, the employee knows that there’s no long-term relationship with their employer and their employer doesn’t even try to make them seem committed.
It’s a stretch to make this is a generational issue though. We designed our economies this way. There are benefits and drawbacks – people definitely have more flexibility now than they did before job-hopping became not just a norm but a requirement in many industries. But the drawback is that training and learning on the job is less popular, which means that we’re pushing it all on colleges and getting a bunch of articles feigning surprise about how many people see college as vocational training.
For all but the scions of wealth, college has always had the job training or credentialing function, although not necessarily exclusively.
The increasing credential-seeking by employers and the rising net price of college is probably tilting the purpose of college (from the point of view of potential students) even more toward the job training or credentialing function these days.
From conversations with my father (or his friends) I always heard that companies did not mind telling new hires: “Great, you have shown that you can handle the school work very well. Now, the first thing we want you to do is apply the general skills you learned, but forget all the details. This is how we do it here, and we will teach you all you need to know!” Again, from what I gathered this is why banks such as Citibank had “training programs” as a step for their managers to be chosen for graduate degrees.
Is that still the case in 2015? I think it might still happen in certain places, but a lot of the hiring decisions, and especially at the smaller and more “modern” companies is based on marketable skills, and skills and experience not necessarily earned in a college setting. People with degrees from highly selective schools do very well in certain industries, but others with no-name degrees and a professional technical experience might do just as well.
The societal trend towards specialization is also at play. Doctors can’t earn a good living (in their view) unless they specialize- family medicine pays less than cardiology. The kid who might have been a 12 month a year athlete in HS when we were growing up is now tracked into travel soccer at age 10 which means giving up tennis, track and fencing. Nobody is interested in “the arts”- they are passionate about opera OR contemporary film OR graphic novels. Somehow you can’t just be someone who likes diverse forms of expression.
I interview young college grads (and soon to be grads) with TRIPLE majors. What the heck does that even mean? You don’t need to triple major to be marketable. You don’t need a double major to be marketable. Major in European history and be fluent in Spanish and French. Gotcha- I know what skills you are bringing to the table. Major in Applied Math but write op-ed’s for the campus newspaper at a college with a well regarded/competitive paper. Gotcha- I get it. Major in Economics and discuss your internship with a foundation that funds clean water projects in India. OK- very interesting.
But triple major in three unrelated disciplines in an effort to specialize???
Add in the fact that college grads are now competing directly with people with specific experience … so employers can pick and choose. Given a choice between someone who has no practical experience and someone who has actually done what you want them to do for the same salary (because there are enough people out of work that even people with experience will take an entry level position if it means having a job…), then of course you take the person with more experience who can jump in and contribute immediately.
I’m going to college to be educated. I want to study French and I want to be a writer. I’m probably not going to make a lot of money in my life, but I am excited to explore different fields in college and grow intellectually. That’s what an education should be about.