A friend of mine sent me a picture of the article he saw in the Business section of the Los Angeles times today.
A little nerdiness here but at the time he sent this to me, it wasn’t online yet. Pretty disorienting when Google hasn’t yet gotten hold of a piece of content.
Anyway I found the story elsewhere online.
Some quotes:
A new survey shows that 83 percent of college seniors don’t have a job lined up for when they graduate even though most of them were looking for one.
The AfterCollege Career Insights Survey, conducted among college students and recent graduates reported that 72.7 percent of seniors were looking for work.
Last year, 80 percent of seniors said they had no definite job plans. According to the survey 81.6 percent of engineering, technology, and math majors didn’t have jobs lined up. Nor did 85.1 percent of those who majored in business.
Now obviously a lot of this has to do with the weakness in the US economy. It’s hard to find a job out there.
I think that there is a deeper story here.
What we have is a fundamental disconnection between the skills our kids are receiving and the skills employers are asking for.
In the tech sector, the economy is on fire and some of my friends and relatives who have sought after programming skills have given me some choice quotes.
“I could quit my job today and be employed in 48 hours”
“I am a contractor by choice, I like to take 3 months off every year. The employers will be there when I get back”
“$100/hour might work, I told the recruiter I would get back to her”
No obviously these are anecdotal but to me, it speaks volumes about the disconnect I spoke of earlier.
I started Learn About The Web because I know there are a lot of kids who want to learn how to start web businesses. I also know that universities want to teach these kids but it’s difficult for these institutions to teach what they don’t know.
Today, we live in the age of the online entrepreneur. Young people are competing with students all around the world who are getting online earlier and getting up to speed faster.
Universities need to start teaching kids next generation skills as FRESHMEN in college and building on those foundations all the way until graduation.
Apart from being the right thing to do, it’s also the smart business model for universities and colleges.
With statistics like 83% starting to appear in the papers, it’s only a matter of time before kids stop taking out six figure loans to go to school.
The university models have to change or die.