Have you always believed a college degree was a guarantee of a great job and great career? It used to be.  Now?  Not so much.  Here’s what happened…

After World War II, the GI Bill paid millions of Vets’ college tuitions. In fact, vets accounted for around half of all college enrollments after the war. Vets with degrees got great jobs.

Those Vets urged their kids to go to college. And they did.

Now, the employment market’s flooded with grads. That means recent grads’ degrees only make them equal with the glut other grads. A degree has become just the minimum cost of entry into the job market.

There’s another factor pointing to new grads’ under- and unemployment, too. Employers report “weak workplace skills” as one of the reasons they’re reluctant to hire recent grads. Skills including “developing concise presentations,” “writing to clarify,” and “giving a presentation” are soft skills, but are necessary to operate in the workplace.

Fact is, most colleges and universities don’t teach workplace skills. They aren’t academic subjects! Hence, the term academia. Besides, universities are different from commercial workplaces. Most classroom professors haven’t operated in a profit & loss environment, so asking them to teach from that perspective is illogical. That’s a brand of thinking that’s tough to understand without experiencing it.

There’s some irony in all of this: some major corporations have been making earmarked grants to universities for teaching workplace skills. In other words, they want the same institutions that acknowledge it’s not their expertise, to teach skills they don’t understand.

Employers have millions of jobs they can’t fill. But they won’t hire recent graduates because they don’t come equipped with workplace skills.

Those employers, many of them Baby Boomers, didn’t learn their workplace skills in college. They gained their skills in the workplace and were trained by their supervisors.

That Millennials want their employers to provide them with necessary training is reasonable and essential. It’s not higher education’s mission to train and it’s always been the function of employers to bring graduates onboard by teaching them the standards and customs of the commercial workplace.