College Graduate: I studied engineering, not English. I still can’t find a job.

The Washington Post has an article from a recent college graduate:

Despite diligent studying, the only real-world business skills I’d learned at college were how to write a résumé and operate three-fifths of the Microsoft Office suite. My college education left me totally unprepared to enter the real workforce. My degree was supposed to make me qualified as a programmer, but by the time I left school, all of the software and programming languages I’d learned had been obsolete for years.

To find real work, I had to teach myself new technologies and skills outside of class, and it wasn’t easy.

My experience is far from unique. Despite rising tuition rates, graduates are finding it increasingly difficult to land jobs (53 percent of college grads under 25 are unemployed or underemployed). More and more graduates are finding that their conceptually-based college educations leave them ill-equipped to handle “real-world” jobs – so much so that, according to some experts, most companies no longer care what their recruits majored in, since they know they’ll have to extensively train them regardless. This is even more poignant in the tech sector – in fact, 47 percent of the technology jobs in New York City no longer require any college education at all. Across the country, only half of high-tech workers have graduated college.

Businesses aren’t looking for college grads, they’re looking for employees who can actually do things – like build iPhone apps, manage ad campaigns and write convincing marketing copy. I wish I’d been taught how to do those things in school, but my college had something different in mind.

Yet, many "progressives" want more people to go to college and take on student loan debt!