Study highlights skills gap in postsecondary job seekers

Students mulling their education options with an eye toward a successful entry into the workforce received a mixed bag of news from the latest assessment of how well postsecondary schools are preparing students for the job market.

More than half of the hiring managers polled in a recent survey expressed the view that colleges do a "good" job preparing students for the workplace, but just 7 percent said they do an "excellent" job. Separately, a slight majority said that they have trouble finding applicants with the appropriate knowledge and skill sets.

The new study comes courtesy of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACSIS), which commissioned FTI Consulting to poll more than 1,000 hiring decision-makers across industries and throughout the country.

According to ACSIS, the criticism they report should not be interpreted as a knock against higher education, but rather an argument for refining existing programs to bring them more into line with what employers are expecting from recent graduates.

"We want the institutions we accredit to focus on a student success model versus a sales model," ACICS Executive Director Al Gray said in a statement.

Higher education more important than ever

ACSIS, founded in 1912, accredits some 800 private post-secondary institutions, and is recognized by the Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. The group accredits degree- and certificate-granting programs, including institutions set up for professional, technical or occupational degrees.

The organization acknowledges that higher education is more important than ever, citing a prominent study from economists at Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce earlier this year that estimated that if current enrollment rates hold, by 2025 the U.S. economy will face a shortfall of 20 million workers with some postsecondary education.

Instead, ACSIS is arguing for steps that universities can take to address the mismatch in skills that employers expect and what many job seekers who have recently finished their postsecondary studies possess.

Forty-five percent of the hiring managers polled said they believed that students would be better served by pursuing a postsecondary program that equipped them with specific skills that they could bring with them to a job. The remaining 55 percent, however, expressed the opinion that a more traditional, "broad-based" program is the wisest approach, giving students a rounded education that can enable them to select a career path.

Unemployment woes due to unprepared workers

The ACSIS survey, accompanied by a white paper offering a detailed analysis, comes in response to the structural unemployment that has gripped the nation's economy for the past three years. In delving into the issue of the skills gap, the researchers begin with the assumption "that substantial job openings exist, but that the availability of qualified workers is deficient, either due to lack of appropriate skills, lack of physical proximity to the communities where the job openings exist, or both."

In the survey of hiring managers, 63 percent of respondents said that applicants are "somewhat prepared" with the skills and knowledge they would need for the job, while just 16 percent said they are "very prepared." Twenty-one percent said applicants are unprepared.

The researchers admitted that the question of how to assess accurately whether schools are succeeding in the mission of equipping students with the tools they will need to thrive in the workforce remains at best unsettled. Certainly the peer-review accreditation process plays a role, but that is an uneven landscape where different types of schools answer to different sets of accrediting organizations.

And indeed, traditional higher education institutions have proven "more entrenched and resistant to a direct, expressed linkage between educational outcomes and workforce development," according to ACSIS.

ACSIS points to several potential paths to address the skills gap, including community college programs, provided their coursework is attuned to the demands of the labor market.

The report also comes with advice for students. In the ACSIS white paper, the author cited a recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute, which found:

"Too few [students] choose fields of study that will give the specific skills employers are seeking," projecting "shortages ... for nutritionists, welders, nurse's aides ... computer specialists and engineers."

The ACSIS report concludes with an acknowledgement that schools and all other parties involved in the landscape of education oversight have an interest in tailoring programs to the skill sets that employers demand. But in an institutional environment such as higher education, that can be a slow ship to turn, placing the onus of reform largely on the schools themselves.