I beg to differ. Employers ARE at least partly to blame.
They’ve fallen for the sales pitch of the education establishment that “we will pop-out grads who are fully prepared to go to work for you. You need not invest one penny of your own to train them.”
And I could fill a book with stories of employers who made bad hires just cause they fell for the fancy degree on the resume.
True story...I worked for a company that had to file a lot of legal paperwork related to permits, licenses, and business visas for their people to travel to foreign countries. They were spending a fortune on legal fees.
Looking to enhance the bottom line they decided to bring this function in house. They trained a young woman who had been our receptionist. She only had a high-school diploma, but was bright and hard-working. The kind of person who, if you show them once how to do a job properly, can do it damned well.
After a year her rejection rate on the visa applications was LOWER than that of the attorneys whom they had been paying $300 per hour.
Unless employers want to be sued, they must require applicants for certain jobs to have a piece of paper called a “college diploma”. That is the pool they must select from. How they make decisions within that pool is another matter. As in every other part of business, sometimes good decisions are made and sometimes not. If the company has someone doing “HR” the first requirement is checking boxes to minimize employment law risk. You’d be hard pressed to find a business owner who believes that HS or college grads in general are prepared to work. Before Griggs people like the receptionist had many more opportunities. The problems in Griggs was that blacks at Duke Power didn’t do as well as whites, so it was assumed by the USSC that the company’s tests were racially biased. You’ve seen the same story litigated over and over again in, for example, police and fire department promotions.