Educational Skills Declining, Job Recruiters Say

Sixty-four percent of big U.S. companies are unhappy with the reading, writing and reasoning abilities of high school graduates entering the work force, a poll of business executives said.

The National Alliance of Business survey found that 72% of executives also thought that new employees’ math skills had worsened the past five years. Sixty-five percent said reading skills had decreased over the same period.

Alliance President William Kolberg said the poll results should worry everyone.

“We are on a collision course with the reality that America is developing a second-class work force whose best feature in the future, compared with other nations, will be low pay,” Kolberg said in an interview about the survey results. “Low skill means low pay.”

Kolberg said new attitudes and approaches are needed to prepare non-college-educated Americans for work.

“We have abandoned the millions of kids who don’t plan to attend college,” he said. “Somewhere along the way, we lost respect for the skills we now so desperately need in our factories and on the front lines of our service industries.”

Kolberg said about 82 million U.S. jobs don’t require a college degree, and filling those jobs may become impossible unless the educational system is changed.

“The entire school enterprise needs to be restructured, rethought and taken much more seriously,” he said, pointing to the national education goals established by President Bush and the nation’s governors.

Kolberg was an assistant secretary of Labor and administrator of the Employment and Training Administration from 1973-77.

The poll, described by the alliance as the first to survey executives either directly or indirectly responsible for recruitment of workers at the 1,200 largest U.S. corporations, said only 36% were satisfied with the competence of those entering the work force.

Kolberg defined competence as being able to read beyond the seventh-grade level and use math at higher than a fifth-grade level.

The survey indicated that companies--many of whose blue-collar and secretarial employees face more challenging work than in the past--have to interview seven to eight applicants to find one acceptable employee.

Personnel officers also said many of those who are hired require too much training to become effective in their jobs. Forty-eight percent were satisfied with the capability of new hires to be trained. Only 16% were satisfied with the educational training of new employees, however.

“Most American companies, particularly smaller companies, have not been able to adopt new forms of work organization because they can’t afford to spend money upgrading worker skills,” Kolberg said. “Our competitors in Europe and Asia have increased productivity by using these new methods of work. Our only response to this competitive situation has been to lower wages.”

The business alliance predicts that by the year 2000, an estimated 5 million to 15 million manufacturing jobs will require skills other than those being used today and that an equal number of service jobs will be obsolete.

The weekly wages of high school graduates dropped from $387.24 in 1969 to $335.20 in 1989. The alliance attributes the 12% decline to a loss in productivity by so-called front-line workers. It compares that to a wage gain of about 8% for a college graduate.