States Risk Missing Higher Ed Opportunities

A new study found that not one state in the United States has enough adult workers who have earned some sort of postsecondary degree to meet its workforce demands. Even those states that graduate a high number of workers with degrees are projected to fall well short of their expected needs by 2025.

The College Opportunity Risk Assessment, a state-by-state comparison of risks to higher educational opportunity from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE), also noted that even states making the most per-student investments are struggling to produce enough graduates.

“The world has changed, but our public policies haven’t,” said Joni Finney, professor of practice at Penn GSE and director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education. “We’re still touting the successes of a system designed in the wake of World War II to allow 30% to 40% of the country, drawn mostly from white, affluent backgrounds, to earn a college degree, even though that system now leaves us woefully unprepared for the challenges of the 21st century.”

According to Finney, states should be prioritizing those students who are traditionally left out of higher education, such as low-income, first-generation, minority, and working-adult students. At the same time, policymakers have to understand that cutting education budgets is turning many students into dropouts with debt and no degree.

We Write Good, Say College Students

College students hold a fairly high opinion of their writing skills, even when their grades don’t merit it.

According to Inside Higher Ed, a new survey by Primary Research Group found that 46% of students didn’t think they needed any more instruction in writing and just over half said they didn’t require assistance with spelling or grammar. About a third were willing to concede their writing and grammatical skills could use a little work, but believed they were able to brush up on their own without formal instruction.

Students who earned A grades were more likely, as you might expect, to say their writing skills were just fine, but students with lower scores were almost as confident. Only 17% of C students admitted to needing more instruction in writing.

Students in their first or second year of college overwhelmingly held a positive view of their writing capabilities, but seniors (who had presumably by then received more feedback from professors on their papers) were somewhat more apt to say they should get more instruction in this area.

The study also determined that about 30% of students have never been assigned to write a paper with more than 10 double-spaced pages, the type of paper typically calling for deeper research and/or analysis. Social-sciences majors were more likely to have written such papers.

Grads Not as Ready for Careers as They Think

Just 41% of U.S. college students said they feel “very” or “extremely” prepared for their post-college career, according to McGraw-Hill Education’s fifth-annual Workforce Survey. While far from ideal, that’s a significant bump up from the 29% who said they felt well prepared in the 2017 survey.

More men (50%) reported feeling “very” or “extremely” prepared for their career, while only 36% of women said the same. Overall, nontraditional students—here meaning those who didn’t enter college within a year of finishing high school—expressed feeling prepared more often (49%) than their traditional counterparts (34%). Students in technical and vocational programs were far more likely to see themselves as well prepared for their career than any other academic discipline.

Fewer than half of the 1,000 students surveyed were confident they’d gained the critical skills necessary to enter the workforce, such as complex problem-solving (43%), résumé writing (37%), and interviewing (34%). There is, however, something of a disconnect between stated desires and actions: Although 51% said they’d like access to more internships and other professional experiences during college, fewer than half reported taking advantage of the career services offered by their institution.

There’s a lot of daylight between students’ perceptions of their own preparedness and how employers see them. Although more than three-quarters of students were confident in their own professionalism and work ethic, the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Job Outlook 2018 learned that just 43% of employers surveyed felt that recent college grads were up to standard in those areas. And while more than 60% of students felt their leadership skills were sufficient for the workplace, only a third of employers agreed with them.

Those findings dovetail with the results of Building Tomorrow’s Talent: Collaboration Can Close Emerging Skills Gap, a new study by Bloomberg Next and Workday Inc., a provider of cloud-based financial and human-resources management software. The study, which queried 100 U.S. academic institutions and an equal number of U.S. corporations, found that only 35% of corporations said new hires possessed both the hard and soft skills to perform at a high level in a professional setting.

There isn’t much encouragement on the horizon, as 84% of academic respondents said budget constraints were the biggest barrier to implementing plans to better prepare students for the workforce.