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Lack of Qualified Workers, Not Jobs

The nation’s 2,500 4-year colleges and 1,600 2-year colleges have a current total enrollment of about 15,000,000 students, and too many of their graduates will be unable to obtain jobs appropriate to their level of education. The unemployment rate among graduates is six percent, but many graduates who are considered “employed” are working jobs that don’t require a degree.

The reason for the high number of unemployed and underemployed college graduates is that most college curriculums do not prepare students to work in today’s economy. Traditional liberal arts courses such as sociology, history and economics help students understand the world in which they live, but do not teach skills that small business owners need their employees to possess.

A small business owner is far more likely to hire an employee who can help him or her operate and add value to a business than one who is versed in classic literature or art history. Colleges and universities are not able to train their students in the approximately 300 skills that are necessary across the spectrum of the nation’s 26 million small businesses. Many business owners would like to delegate tasks like maintaining financial records, creating mailing lists, hiring attorneys or accountants, comparing and purchasing insurance policies, maintaining websites, etc. And they would, if they could find employees capable of performing those tasks.

Here is the crux of the problem: Every state regulates post-secondary vocational training, and any individual or group that wishes to provide such training must follow a time-consuming and costly application process, with no guarantee of success. The licensing requirements are so extreme that not a single program or school is licensed to teach students how to assist the owner of a small business. Carl Person may be the only individual who has ever obtained a license, accreditation and federal student loan approval for such a program.

Carl created the training program in the late 1980s after he was interviewed on local television about his willingness to take people off the New York City welfare rolls—at his own expense—in exchange for a percentage of the money he would save the city. The Health Addiction Services Agency, which at the time was part of the city’s welfare system, asked Carl to create a program for addicted persons who were on welfare. He created and submitted the program, and shortly thereafter met with the city lawyer in charge of the project. At the meeting, the lawyer (a highly placed lawyer for New York City) told him, “Carl, your program is the most fantastic program I have ever seen, and I want to be your first student in the program.”

The program was no more than a list of subjects that Carl already knew and wanted to have other people learn, so they could be an assistant to him and other small business owners. The subjects to be taught were the things he had to learn over the years as a small business owner, things which 26,000,000 other small business owners were also learning and doing. Unlike most traditional college and university curriculums, this curriculum would be changed regularly to meet the needs of the employment market.

Cities everywhere could implement such a program, which would provide unemployed individuals with the skills they need to obtain well-paying, in-demand jobs. Business owners could structure the assistant’s pay based on the amount of time the assistant saves them. For example, if a small business owner estimates that the assistant saves the owner 12 hours a week at a rate of $100 per hour, the assistant would earn $1,200 a week. The business owner could use that time to generate earnings that significantly exceed what the assistant earns.

Many groups would benefit from the program, including:

Recent college graduates who are unemployed or underemployed;
Chronically unemployed persons who have given up looking for work, provided they are willing and able to learn;
Older Americans, particularly those who already have experience running their own business;
Those being threatened with job loss or layoffs by large corporations.

It’s time to let our elected officials know that there is no job shortage, only the excessive government regulation that prevents adequate training.