"US to face dearth of 11 million skilled workers by 2025”

Over 2 million students across the United States (US) are graduating from the colleges. That's an achievement to celebrate.

"Although I dropped out of college, got lucky pursuing a career in software and getting a degree is a much surer path to success," says Bill Gates.

College graduates usually expect to find a rewarding job, earn higher income and wish to live healthier lives. They also bring training and skills into America's workforce, helping our economy grow and stay competitive. It is sad that America is not producing more number of graduates.

By 2025, two thirds of all jobs in the US will require education beyond high school. According to the current statistics, graduates in US are not able to meet the growing demands of skilled workers.

"The country is expected to face a dearth of 11 million skilled workers to fill those roles over the next 10 years," according to a new study by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce.

In this regard a discussion was held with Cheryl Hyman, the chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, and tried to trace out the problems, eventually realised that the problem is not that students are not taking admissions in colleges but problem is students are not completing graduation.

Over 36 million American, a fifth of the working population have gone off to college, and left without a degree.

It is the need of the hour to hold a discussion with students in order to find the root cause to drop out of graduation.

There could be several reasons for students to stop pursuing education, of which poverty could be one of the reasons, wherein, they are not able to meet the tuition fee.

Secondly, many quit when they realise that their high schools didn't prepare them academically for college.

The high percentage of student, who don't finish college are basically from the low-income backgrounds.

This leads to the scarcity of skilled workers in the labour market, which drives up wages for those with a graduation. Thus, all these elements result in economic inequality in America.

To get rid of this problem, a foundation has been established to work for the welfare of the students.The foundation aims at helping students from the low-income background and first generation students to complete the graduation.

Plan has also been chalked out to implement the personalised online guidance tools, which helps in providing students semester-by-semester to graduate.

All the above said efforts are vital to fill in the gap. According to Cheryl, " Many years colleges measured success by how many students enrolled in their institutions but not on whether they were training students for jobs to meet the demand in the market."

However, it is time for higher education and the "real world" of employers to start working together to meet the demand for 11 million skilled workers in the US.

Source: gatesnotes, the blog of Bill Gates