A study by the Career Advisory Board found that while 72 percent of job seekers are confident they can present the skills needed for a job, just 15 percent of hiring managers have the skills to fill open positions.
That's no surprise because the vast majority of our 1,500 four-year (a misnomer) colleges are now 98.6 schools: virtually all you need to get in is normal body temperature--Have you tried to engage in an intelligent conversation with the typical undergraduate at, say, Middle Tennessee State University?
So, except at the small percentage of elite institutions, professors have been forced to dumb-down classes. leaving the bright bored and the slow still bewildered. Indeed, other studies, notably this major nationwide study found that almost half of college students grow little or not at all in writing and thinking skills.
As a result, an American college degree, despite taking years and costing a true fortune, no longer signifies competence in reading, thinking, etc. It more likely signifies that the student has been liberalized or radicalized, which may demotivate them as employees. Indeed the aforementioned new study speaks of employers frustrated with the today's American college graduates' lack of work ethic.
Is it any wonder why 53.6 percent of college graduates are un- or underemployed at the same time as companies are urging expansion of the H1-B visa program so they can hire more foreigners?
And if that's the state of U.S.college graduates, imagine what the 46 percent of freshmen are like who, even if given six years, don't graduate?
Macbeth concluded that life is "full of sound and fury and signifying nothing." Might that increasingly be applied to American undergraduate education?
