What Employers Want

I haven't linked to Inside Higher Ed in a few days, but lest you think I've forgotten them, they have a short piece today about the results of a survey of employers "with at least 25 employees and significant hiring of recent college graduates," regarding the preparation of their recent hires.

It turns out that employers aren't as frustrated with the skills of new graduates as some politicians and policy makers suggest. In a number of areas, employers appear to think graduates are coming out well positioned. And while employers would love to see better assessment tools used in college (as you may have heard from some critics of higher education), employers seem dubious of multiple choice exams and how colleges compare to one another and much more concerned with being able to get individual analyses of potential employees' skills.

This is, of course, an important result that everyone should read because it confirms my pre-existing beliefs, and flies in the face of statements by politicians I disapprove of. A couple of things did jump out, though, as deserving of further comment, even trivial comment:

One was this sentence:

Over all, 65 percent of those surveyed believe that new graduates of four-year colleges have most or all of the skills to succeed in entry-level positions, but only 40 percent believe that they have the skills to advance.

This struck me as a little puzzling at first-- isn't that the point of entry-level positions? Not everybody who enters will have the attributes needed to leave.

I think that probably stems from unconsciously reading this as a statement that only 40% of students have the skills to advance, when it's actually saying that 40% of employers think that the majority of students they see have the skills they need, which is a slightly different thing.

The other comment-worthy bit:

46 percent said it would be very effective and 70 percent said it would be very or fairly effective to have students complete an advanced project as seniors, demonstrating knowledge in the major and in problem-solving, writing, and analytic skills. And 69 percent said it would be very effective and 83 percent said it would be very or fairly effective to see an evaluation of a supervised internship where students apply college learning in a "real-world setting."

Undergraduate research, baby! Here's another study to go in the big file of material demonstrating that involving students in research projects is a valuable part of our educational mission.