According to a study performed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and reported by the Christian Science Monitor, employers believe that the college graduates they hire lack writing and analytical skills. This, coming from a job market insisting on highly specialized training, is somewhat hypocritical. It is these very employers who are prompting college students to streamline their academic studies, sacrificing the balanced education essential to cultivating analytical and communication skills.
To be well-rounded in this age of higher education, a student can ill-afford to enroll in a stringent skill-based program such as engineering, pharmacy or architecture; as it is, many general education requirements are already waived for these students to allow them to graduate on time. It is ludicrous to believe that a "renaissance person" would emerge from a discipline whose program is precisely planned out over a student's college tenure.
The problem, thus, is not in education, but in the job market. If companies were so intent on hiring those with expert writing skills, they would express it in their personnel. As it is, people who graduate with liberal arts degrees and trained in analysis and writing have a difficult time finding positions. For corporate employers to complain about their employees' shortcomings in those areas comes across as shallow, mere rhetoric without substance. If they truly want well-rounded students, they should put their money where their mouth is - by hiring students with such qualities.
This study is noble in its intent; it emphasizes social consciousness in learning, focusing on the "ethical consequences of actions." It attempts to tackle what the study's authors see as higher education's shortcomings in the 21st Century. While the ideal of a liberal arts undergraduate education followed by a more focused graduate education is one that is very attractive, the reality is somewhat different.
Many students cannot afford a graduate education to refine their broad-based undergraduate skills; instead, they rely on their undergraduate time to gather as many applicable skills as possible. In doing this, they are rewarded with six-figure jobs upon graduation, so the incentive, as the study puts it, to "learn another language, understand global and cross-cultural relationships, and value the history underlying U.S. democracy," is limited at best.
In the long-term, reevaluating educational goals on the part of colleges and universities is wonderful, but for the undergraduate who has to pay back loans and will be looking for a job in the near future, long-term paradigm shifts hold no interest. The short-term dictates much of what college students do; four years is usually all they have to make themselves viable in the job market. Job availability is the primary factor in an undergraduate's choice of academic program. General education does what it can to broaden the horizons of a student, but to change the educational system would mean that the hiring system has to change first.
Interviewers do not care about the junior year Shakespeare class an applicant took. Instead, they look for internships, workplace experience, and technical skill. It would be wonderful if electrical engineers were able to critique Nietzche at a cocktail party, but with little room for even technical electives, it is not likely they would be able to even if that were within their scope of interest.
In this day and age, businesses cannot realistically expect each new hire to be proficient in writing and thinking analytically in addition to technical training; without a doubt, broad-based knowledge would come only at the cost of specialized skills. It is not feasible with their demands for employment. Companies looking for employees with skills in all areas are not likely to find success in hiring. If they complain about the quality of the writing and analytical skill of the graduates they hire, they should remember that they set the trend in education, not the other way around.
