Facing the Facts on U.S. Education and the “Skills Gap”

This powerful YouTube video produced by the Literate Nation Organization delivers an informative, but “frightening” reality about the current state of U.S. education and literacy rates. The U.S. education data referenced in this video concludes that the quality of our nation’s education has fallen far behind other world powers on all education levels, including: elementary, high school, college and university. As a result, America is no longer in a class of its own as the global leader that produces the majority of top talent and innovation for global companies. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. at an ever-increasing rate. Right here and now is a critical turning point for the state of education in our country. If we don’t act soon to reform our education systems, then we risk falling even further behind.

There are several eye-opening U.S. education facts shown in the video. To point out a few: high school SAT scores are at a 40-year low, U.S. college graduation rankings have fallen rapidly from 1st to 12th globally, 80% of U.S. high school students’ daily study consists of low-level mental work (compared to countries like China that focus on math, science, problem solving, and high-level mental work), and our public school systems are struggling to keep up with teaching performance and classroom quality. Consequently, the majority of U.S. high school students, particularly those from low performing public schools, are not college ready. They lack the skill sets to get through a college curriculum and become productive members of our workforce. This creates a massive “skills gap” in America with 3.1 million job openings for “skilled” workers that American companies are unable to fill because our college graduates are not learning the job skills that matchup with the needs and requirements for available jobs. But there is hope…

How do we close this gap and help solve the problem of lacking education performance in our own country? From the perspective of Literate Nation, students need to be taught at a young age the necessary reading proficiency skills in order to develop intellectual curiosities, open doors for college degrees, and eventually land real-world jobs. At Education at Work, we support this initiative, and can offer up an additional perspective on how we also strive to help reduce the U.S. “skills gap” problem.

We focus our organization’s efforts on helping U.S. college students lower their college debt, acquire a set of applicable job skills, and find full-time jobs after graduation. In order to benefit the cause, we believe that American colleges and universities need to improve the teaching of core academic skills that translate directly to the workplace, such as critical thinking, professional communication, presentation skills and problem solving abilities, instead of primarily focusing on proving theoretical models. Additionally, we strongly believe that first-hand internship and work experience while college students are enrolled in classes will also help them learn the critical job skills they need to succeed. If our nation fails to ensure that domestic talent is properly educated and qualified, then we will continue to lose quality U.S. jobs to better educated, highly prepared, and (in some cases) more driven foreign talent.

Unfortunately, education in America no longer seems to be a top priority, but it needs to be for us to compete in a global society. There is a major need for the U.S. to generate more domestic jobs, continue producing top talent, stimulate our economy and work towards balancing our national budget as we approach the upcoming “fiscal cliff” in 2013. Through the Education at Work program, we’ve found out firsthand that many of today’s college students are lacking the critical skills they need to prepare for current job openings at U.S. companies. But, they have high learning curves and are eager to acquire these necessary job skills if given the opportunity, which is why we only employ college students to fill our part-time Customer Service Professional roles. We view this as a perfect starting job to allow our nation’s college students to gain experience and prepare for full-time job openings that currently exist, as well as future jobs that will exist, regardless of their current major or desired career path.

Thus, we believe that accessing an affordable college education with minimal debt and acquiring work experience along the way seems to be a proven formula to setup our next generation workforce for success. If we come together, Americans can focus their efforts on changing how we think about our education system, improve overall performance, and consider new ways to finance the increasing cost of a college degree and develop critical job skills. We need to get back on track as a nation, and no time is better then right now!

Stay tuned to our blog for a follow-up post later this week. We will be discussing some tips for college students on how to avoid accruing student debt while in school, and other suggestions on how to best manage your spending money.