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Just 41% of U.S. college students said they feel “very” or “extremely” prepared for their post-college career, according to McGraw-Hill Education’s fifth-annual Workforce Survey . While far from ideal, that’s a significant bump up from the 29% who said they felt well prepared in the 2017 survey. More men (50%) reported feeling “very” or “extremely” prepared for their career, while only 36% of women said the same. Overall, nontraditional students—here meaning those who didn’t enter college within a year of finishing high school—expressed feeling prepared more often (49%) than their traditional counterparts (34%). Students in technical and vocational programs were far more likely to see themselves as well prepared for their career than any other academic discipline. Fewer than half of the 1,000 students surveyed were confident they’d gained the critical skills necessary to enter the workforce, such as complex problem-solving (43%), résumé writing (37%), and interviewing (34%). There is, ...

As the world heads toward a more automated economy rooted in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), the United States ranks behind other wealthy nations in how well it’s preparing students for that future. A new study by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and analysis division of The Economist Group, rated the U.S. ninth in its “automation readiness” index—behind South Korea, Germany, Singapore, Japan, Canada, Estonia, France, and the U.K. The study looked at policies to promote technological progress, creation of new businesses, and the development of policies and skills to help manage a transitioning labor market. “If countries need a long-term strategy to deal with the challenges of automation, education must be at the center of it,” stated the report, which ranked the U.S. ninth in terms of its education policies. Students will need human-centered soft skills, such as critical thinking and communication, as well as grounding in certain hard skills that will ne...

The California Community Colleges system includes 114 colleges in 72 districts and serves more than two million students. Even that may not be enough to both train incoming students for careers and help existing workers transition to new roles as the U.S. job landscape undergoes sweeping change. In his State of the State address earlier this year, Gov. Jerry Brown estimated there are 2.5 million Californians between the ages of 25-34 who are in the workforce but lack a postsecondary degree or certificate. To help those workers, the CCC system’s chancellor, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, wants to develop a new online community college to deliver badly needed courses. Brown asked the legislature to approve $100 million in startup funds for the project, along with $20 million in ongoing annual costs. If the money is approved, the new college would begin enrolling students for fall 2019. “These are individuals who cannot drop everything they’re doing to come to our colleges and spend two or three year...