Good question! I suspect what they really college graduates need most are skills and knowledge that (a) are incredibly hard to measure; and, even more to the point, (b) are incredibly hard to teach.
What Degrees Should Mean
Inside Higher Ed, January 25, 2011What should a college graduate know and be able to do? There are as many views on that as there are colleges (thousands), if not individual professors and students (many more).
The diversity of opinions about what a college education means has long been seen as a strength of American higher education. But in recent years, many employers and policy makers have argued that the lack of a common definition of what students should know and be able to do — and a dearth of adequate methods of gauging whether they know it and can do it — has contributed to a decline in the quality of higher education and to the awarding of more degrees, but of lesser value.
The push to set such standards at a national (and even federal) level has, in turn, led many college and faculty leaders to complain that a one-size-fits-all approach to defining student learning would result in greatly oversimplified definitions of learning.