It doesn’t seem to make sense: Employers complain of a lack of suitable applicants despite being inundated with a glut of highly educated jobseekers. Applicants are confused, too. A recent study from McKinsey & Company’s Center for Government found that 44 percent of young U.S. jobseekers included in a survey weren’t sure that their postsecondary education improved their chances of finding a job, and 45 percent of U.S. employers said a lack of skills is the main reason they’re not able to fill entry-level jobs.
In another study, this one by The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media, researchers found that almost a third of employers surveyed said colleges are doing only a fair or even a poor job of producing good employees. Employer complaints focused on graduates who lacked basics such as adaptability, communications skills, and the ability to solve complex problems.
Despite noting shortcomings on the part of colleges and universities, more employers than ever are insisting that their employees have college degrees. The Chronicle of Higher Education study says two-thirds of employers almost never waive degree requirements when hiring. Also, the kinds of jobs that once didn’t require a degree now often do.
Certainly technological advances have made higher education more necessary than it once was in some segments of the economy. Manufacturing is on example. Factory work that once required little education beyond on-the-job training is often more complicated now and may require high-level math and computer skills. But since the recession, other jobs that might not require a degree are now often filled by people who have graduated from four-year institutions.
The Chronicle study asked employers how they value a bachelor’s degree today versus five years ago. Thirty-nine percent said about the same, 26 percent said less, 25 percent said more, eight percent said a lot more, and just two percent said a lot less. By industry, manufacturing employers were the ones most likely to value a bachelor’s degree more now than five years ago, followed by service/retail employers.
The McKinsey study, which was conducted in the United States and eight other countries, found that employers, education providers, and young job seekers “have fundamentally different understandings of the same situation,” according to the study’s executive summary. “Fewer than half of youth and employers, for example, believe that new graduates are adequately prepared for entry-level positions. Education providers, however are much more optimistic: 72 percent of them believe new graduates are ready to work,” the report says.
The study concludes that when jobseekers, employers, and educators aren’t on the same page it’s because they aren’t engaging with one another. “One-third of employers say they never communicate with education providers; of those that do, fewer than half say it proved effective,” the study summary says.
But getting employers, jobseekers, and educators on the same page may be the answer, according to the study. “Two features stand out among all the successful programs we reviewed,” the summary says. “First, education providers and employers actively step into one another’s worlds. Employers might help to design curricula and offer their employees as faculty, for example, while education providers may have students spend half their time on a job site and secure them hiring guarantees.”
The second feature of successful interaction between educators and employers relates to how they form relationships with students early on. “Instead of three distinct intersections occurring in a linear sequence (enrollment leads to skills, which lead to a job), the education-to-employment journey is treated as a continuum in which employers commit to hire youth before they are enrolled in a program to build their skills,” the study summary says. “The problem, then, is not that success is impossible or unknowable – It is that it is scattered and small scale compared with the need.”