Do Colleges Prepare Students for Jobs?

The authors of this Harvard Business Review article tell us that employers are making a short-sighted mistake by hiring college graduates. Just being a college graduate does not mean that you have the skills necesssary to do a real job.

Unfortunately, they do not, within the confines of their article, distinguish between students who have majored in physics or engineering and students who have majored in critical race theory.

At that point, we have trouble following their arguments. After all, hiring the products of an engineering school is not the same as hiring students who have majored in Women’s Studies.

Besides, we hasten to emphasize a point we have made in the past, the tech staff at Silicon Valley companies is invariably Chinese. And that means, they have been educated in China. 

And we add that companies nowadays are suffering from an insufficiency of staff with the right technical skills to work in a high tech business.

The authors explain that companies should stop hiring college graduates and should open their minds to other educational paths. Obviously, this depends on the job and it depends on the student’s major. The authors do not specify any of this, so you start wondering why the HBR published this tissue of empty generalizations.

They write:

In an age of ubiquitous disruption and unpredictable job evolution, it is hard to argue that the knowledge acquisition historically associated with a university degree is still relevant.

Again, it depends on which degrees we are talking about. If a candidate needs skills in physics or engineering or multivariable calculus, a high school diploma, coupled with technical training, will not be very useful.

If you have enough patience and you read further you will discover that many college graduates are suffering from a lack of what are called soft skills. They do not know how to interact productively with co-workers and therefore have difficulty fulfilling any management duties.

Now, if the authors had thought at all about the question, they might have observed that college students, in many cases, do best at getting along with people who are roughly of the same socioeconomic class. Soft skills work best when people have more in common.

You might think, as I believe, that class differences matter. We might agree that college students tend to come from similar privileged backgrounds, and therefore, that they can relate to people who have more in common. But then, the argument about the absence of soft skills seems to be inaccurate. Unless you question the authors' assumption and discover that the rage toward diversity has produced student populations that are starkly divided on the grounds of academic ability and ethnicity.

Anyway, the authors want to promote more diversity. As you might have guessed:

Many universities do select students on meritocratic grounds, but even merit-based selection is conflated with variables that decrease the diversity of admitted applicants. In many societies, there is a strong degree of assortative mating based on income and class. In the U.S., affluent people are more likely to marry other affluent people, and families with more money can afford to pay for schools, tutors, extracurriculars, and other privileges that increase their child’s likelihood of accessing an elite college education. This, in turn, affects the entire trajectory of that child’s future, including their future career prospects — providing a clear advantage to some and a clear disadvantage to others.

Now, diversity in such circumstances is not a strength. It makes it more difficult for people to get along. When famed Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam researched the level of social interaction in highly diverse neighborhoods, he discovered that people did not get along with each other. They tended to avoid those who were of different ethnicities. 

The authors might be semi-correct to suggest that today’s workers do not know how to get along with other workers, but the solution to the problem obviously does not involve more diversity. Here, diversity is the problem, not the solution.

And yet, the criticism of the absence of soft skills surely has validity. Perhaps it is true, as they assert, that good workers are not necessarily college graduates. But, does that not suggest that these education mills are not doing their job? Does it not suggest that colleges are damaging young minds? Does it not suggest that colleges have given themselves over to indoctrination in radical leftist ideology.

One might imagine, it does not take too much imagination, that college students, having lived through the mind-deadening efforts of many of today’s professors, end up incapable of doing most jobs and end up incapable of relating to other human beings. If you learn in college to watch your language, lest you fall afoul of the thought police, you are going to have unlearned any capacity you might have had to relate to other human beings, to exercise your soft skills.

To be fair and balanced, you might get a job in marketing at Anheuser-Busch and go to work destroying the brand reputation of their best-selling beer.

The authors suggest that universities should be teaching people soft skills. One might suggest that anything would be better than the current diet of radical leftist thought. And one might suggest that the effort to admit candidates who have not made the grade on standardized testing has produced too much of an aptitude disparity to be overcome by classes in etiquette.

Having said that, universities could substantially increase the value of the college degree if they spent more time teaching their students critical soft skills. Recruiters and employers are unlikely to be impressed by candidates unless they can demonstrate a certain degree of people-skills. This is perhaps one of the biggest differences between what universities and employers look for in applicants. 

Heaven knows what they really mean by people skills. Perhaps they are preparing for the day when the Supreme Court bans affirmative action admissions. Then, clever college administrators will be obliged to find new criteria for admissions, criteria that have nothing to do with the ability to do college level work, but that emphasize empathy and personality.

All told, the HBR essay fails on many levels. Sad to see it in an otherwise estimable publication.

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