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Each spring, millions of graduates receive a diploma, walk across the stage, and prepare to become citizens of the real world but once the pomp and circumstance have faded, many are hit with the harsh reality of not feeling prepared to go into the workforce. More than 60% of US graduates indicated inconsistencies between college preparation and employers' expectations in a 2022 survey conducted by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). Employers also verify this, with some affirming that there is a discrepancy between classroom teaching and requirements of contemporary working environments.

The perception of "unpreparedness" among US graduates is not about lack of motivation or intelligence, but rather one of mismatch between the higher education system and the changing jobs market. By filling in the gap with work-based learning and soft skill acquisition, colleges can make degrees actual launchpads.

Why this gap?

The employers want digital equipment skills, communication, problem-solving and team working, which are not necessarily prioritized in the traditional classes but the majority of the graduates have strong theoretical foundations and little application. A 2019 Journal of Education and Work study showed that employers graded the graduates lower in terms of adaptability, problem-solving and communication compared to technical skills.

Not all students do internships, apprenticeships, and project work. Without them, the graduates are left lost when they transition from theory to practice. In 2021, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found that students who had internship experience were twice as likely to report confidence in job readiness compared to non-internship students.

Graduates have at times been given degrees without knowing the needs of the labour market. Excess in certain areas and shortages in others are created as a result, with the majority of graduates having degrees but no mission.

A Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce survey done in 2020 revealed that there were job openings in healthcare, skilled trades and tech fields, yet oversurplused graduates from majors experienced more underemployment.

Entering the workplace also requires emotional resilience, which most students lack. Pressure to perform and ambiguity in career choices can escalate stress. A 2021 Journal of Adolescent Research report presented that students who lacked good coping skills reported greater difficulty adapting to initial career challenges despite GPA. 

How to fix it?

Inject career preparation into the curriculum: Colleges may integrate workplace simulations, group projects and case studies into all majors.

Increase internship opportunities: University-industry collaborations may offer official, paid internships to additional students.

Increase soft skill learning: Communication, leadership and flexibility courses need to be mandatory, not elective.

Accelerate early career guidance: Students need to be guided about labour market demand and career options before declaring major.

Enable lifelong learning: Upskilling, certification and e-learning need to become the norm as career development.

A report in 2022 by the Brookings Institution discovered that graduates who combined classroom learning with practical experience (internships, research, co-ops) were 30% more satisfied in their jobs and had easier work transitions. The message is clear for students: your degree matters but the capabilities, experiences and perseverance you acquire alongside are the things that actually set you up to succeed.

The White House is hailing news that one of the top medical education accreditors will drop its DEI mandates.

"President Trump is preserving civil rights and restoring opportunity based on merit. Organizations such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education are making the smart choice in deciding not to continue to waste resources on polarizing DEI departments," White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston told Fox News Digital.

"American greatness is founded on individual dignity, hard work and excellence, and these humiliating 'equity' directives have no business in our institutions," Huston said.

In a release last week obtained by Fox News Digital, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) stated that it will scrap its DEI mandates and close its Department of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

"Recent federal mandates, such as executive orders and a pending rule by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, have barred accrediting agencies from mandating or otherwise promoting an emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)," ACGME stated in a release.

"Such mandates have been applied to programs and hospitals that receive Medicare reimbursement for GME," the release continued.

The group, which is an independent nonprofit that formulates and monitors graduate medical education standards including residencies and fellowships, indicated it will adhere to President Donald Trump's several executive orders to cut DEI.

"In accordance with these federal mandates, the ACGME has taken a number of steps, such as retiring DEI-specific accreditation requirements, revising the organization's applicable policies and procedures, and closing the Department of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion," ACGME stated.

In the statement, ACGME indicated it will help "stakeholders through this transition," and ensure their "accreditation system represents both the highest standards of medical education for all fellows and residents caring for all patients and the regulatory environment in place."

A number of the nation's biggest police departments have reduced education standards in recent years, leading to concerns about what the trend means to communities nationwide.

The New York City Police Department lowered the number of college credits cadets must have from 60 to 24 in February in an attempt to increase declining applicant levels. The Dallas City Council unanimously voted in June to do away with the requirement that recruits have college credit, following similar actions by the Memphis and New Orleans police departments over the past decade.

The reformulations have made headlines at the national level, with experts opining whether they are more positive or negative developments for police forces and communities.

Regardless of the viewpoint, the updates do not necessarily imply much is changing in U.S. policing practices, nor that they are leading the way for law enforcement standards nationwide.

That's because most cities have minimum requirements on the books requiring applicants to possess a high school diploma or GED, Dr. Heidi S. Bonner, Chair of East Carolina University's Criminal Justice and Criminology Department, said to the Washington Examiner.

"Bird's eye level view, there are very few states that have education requirements and mandates," she said.

"There are just two currently, and then California would be the third," added Bonner, citing a legislative initiative currently underway in the Golden State to mandate most new officers possess a policing certificate, an associate degree, or a bachelor's degree.

There's a few states that've recently reformed Basic Law Enforcement Training and then modified some of their courses. But that's not an education mandate. And then there's some individual agencies that've modified in terms of lowering their educational requirements," she went on to say.

Most states, however, at the state level, still have high school diploma and GED cluster academy training and their certification. So that's the standard nationwide.

Statistics from a 2017 nationwide survey of almost 1,000 departments revealed that about 80% of law enforcement agencies merely need a high school diploma to become employed. In states such as South Carolina, which is one of the nation's most rapidly expanding states, but holds education requirements well below a high school degree for only a very small percentage of police departments, changes in larger city departments such as the NYPD or Dallas Police Department to eliminate some college prerequisites have no implications for their future policing standards. Of all law enforcement departments in the Palmetto State that were polled in a 2019 University of South Carolina study of police education needs, 93% of all municipal departments and 95% of sheriff's departments only required a high school diploma or equivalent for recruits. "At state levels, each agency may have more education requirements…so they can establish their own ceilings," said Bonner, but since most still only require a high school diploma, she doesn't see shifts from departments like the NYPD and others to eliminate higher education requirements as likely to have a broad impact on "public trust."

What the changes indicate is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for police departments to recruit young people, a vital change from decades ago when the job was considered to be a worthy career, experts say.

For the biggest departments in the nation, that means they're finding themselves more and more needing to make adjustments to standards to encourage the career path. For them, the plus of a lower education requirement of a high school diploma is that it opens up a wider applicant pool. When the NYPD eliminated some higher education requirements in February, applications every day increased from a then-average of 53 to 231, a news release said. The agency inducted about 1,100 recruits in early August, its largest new class in almost a decade.

In an ideal world, you would want police chiefs to be as educated as you can possibly get them, and that you do know that means getting a college degree.

Policing has gotten very complex," said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, in an interview. "[But] the fact is, it has been tough the last five years to recruit new police officers.". There just is more demand than there are enough who want to become police officers. And so what police departments are experiencing is a hiring crisis, and they're not there are not enough college-educated applicants for policing." Higher standards could be positive as police have been asked to shoulder more and more responsibilities over the past decade in the era of community policing, Wexler said, but it's simply not a feasible requirement for agencies to adopt across the board amid a national shortage of police officers.

And the gap is not soon to be eliminated because of fundamental generational changes in attitudes about policing as a career, and with it, spells portent for states like California, and for any of the thousands of agencies around the nation with minimum educational qualifications with aspirations of elevating their standards.

Where once earlier generations found meaning in police work as a lifelong dedication to public service, younger generations are more likely to reject the long hours and increasingly unfavorable attitudes surrounding the career path for more lucrative jobs with greater flexibilities.

And they also are more likely to be wary of risks associated with the job, said Jillian Snider, a former police officer with the NYPD who is now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "We have a recruitment as well as a retention problem," she told an interviewer, pointing out that there has been a significant change since the early 2000s, a time of high patriotism and civic duty when individuals were opting to enter the policing vocation "as a response to 9/11" and soldiers were returning from fighting in the Iraq war "and were entering the work." You're not seeing an interest in a law enforcement career among the next generation, these young people that are in their late teens, early 20s, and are starting to contemplate, what am I going to do when I'm a grown-up?

They're not seeing these 20, 25, and 30-year careers.

They're going into 3,4,5-year jobs and then leaving to do something else," Snider said. "Pay is one of the largest motivators in that generation." Police, traditionally, do not offer high, more competitive wages in a great number of jurisdictions." 

Wexler mentioned Michael Brown's killing, which took place the same year, as another incident that stirred a change of opinions, and contributed to a fall in better-educated youths drawn to policing.

A wave of national "defund the police" demonstrations followed when Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. TRUMP'S HIGHER EDUCATION CRACKDOWN RESHAPES ELITE CAMPUSES AS STUDENTS RETURN "Honestly, I believe that we're in an era where policing has been very difficult," Wexler said. "I've lectured at a great many colleges. I've lectured at Georgetown, I've lectured at Princeton, I've lectured at Harvard, and other places. And I'll sometimes turn to the class and say, 'How many of you want to be a police officer one day?'"

"Nobody ever raises their hand," he said.

America, land of opportunity, always proudly wore the badge of leading classrooms with analytical acumen and literary sophistication, giving birth to generations as erudite in thinking as they were in calculation. That legacy is still unknown today.   According to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), there is a worrying trend: about one-third of high school seniors cannot read at a basic level, and 45% of them struggle with basic math.   These numbers are not a singular instance; rather, they are the result of a decade-long, clandestine undermining of the country's intersectionality of systemic pedagogical reform, the unabated penetration of digital culture, and cultural paradigms that are subtly but significantly altering the reading, thinking, and calculation habits of young Americans.

In effect, a generation lost its way, not all at once, but step by step, sentence by sentence, calculation by calculation. Lost is the question of how children got behind, but how a society that prized intellectual grit allowed the very foundations of literacy and numeracy to slide through its fingers.

Pandemic or preexisting trends?

With online education and school shutdowns placing the crisis into overdrive, the trend had already been solidly in place well before 2020. NAEP data indicate reading literacy among 12th graders fell from 74% to 67% between 2013 and 2024, while mathematics proficiency fell from 65% to 55% over a span of two years. These numbers indicate decades of eroding foundations and argue pandemic disruption served as spur rather than cause of collapse.

The attention deficit of the digital age

 Extended reading and demanding problem-solving have lost the staying power. Today's high school students will read only three of twenty books that members of older generations had read, says Carol Jago, associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project, according to Associated Press.

Instructional narrowing and narrowed curricula

Design of math and English curriculum put more emphasis on short texts, snippets, and test-taking. Procedural fluency is more emphasized than reasoning and conceptual understanding for math. For reading, the students get less time to read longer pieces of work or compound arguments. Thus, the students are less capable of managing the extended, real-world problems they will face in college and the workforce.

The widening gulf of inequality

Performance slip in attainment is uneven. NAEP data demonstrate the widening gaps: Low-performing schools and poor family students are disproportionately burdened. The science, technology, engineering, and math gender gap also re-opened because girls lost additional science and math ground when the targeted intervention programs disappeared. The school system now threatens to widen instead of close social gaps.

Social pressures magnifying educational deficits

Beyond the classroom, social conditions exacerbate these declines. Increased screen use, shorter attention spans, and less exposure to longer reading styles all contribute to the acceleration of the literacy decline.  

Rebuilding foundations: A way forward

Experts argue that the trends must be turned around with deeper pedagogical change: longer reading texts, inquiry STEM education, and good problem-solving provision should take precedence. Policy reaction is also essential, for instance, intervention in low-performing schools, investment in initial literacy, and narrowing gender and socioeconomic gaps through programs.

On the other end of crisis management

Erosion of English and math skills among American students is a long-standing, intricate crisis with deepening educational, cultural, and technological roots. While the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare vulnerabilities, it did not instill them. Restoring intellectual capital, rediscovering joy of learning, and igniting curiosity are the critical mission to equip students for an information-based 21st century. Indifference risks saddling a generation of students with college unreadiness, economic shortcomings, and civic inefficacy.

A mother whose child has special educational needs (SEN) explained that she "feels like a prisoner" at home because she cannot get her son into daycare.

Suzy Ward was part of around 50 individuals, comprising parents and children, who protested outside Stormont Buildings on Monday morning regarding what they state is an absence of support and services.

The protest comes on the day that assembly members return to Stormont after the summer break.

Suzy Ward explained to BBC News NI her son Eoyn is home full-time now, stating it means she does not "get a break" and is "constantly on the go".

"I feel very much that we need opportunities and respite and support," Ms Ward stated.

"It's so hard. There's days when we are both at home and I feel like a prisoner."

Education Minister Paul Givan said he was aware of the "real challenges" in the sector.

But he indicated that he plans to set up a "flagship" capital programme for the SEN school estate.

"All of this has now been mapped out," he said.

"I will need other parties to support me. I met the finance minister just last week, I outlined to him the ask we're going to require. It's £1.7bn over the next 10 years."

Sheena McCann, who was at the protest, said her son Joe is 17 and they are in the process of transitioning him into adult care services.

"In our situation we are being offered two days in the day centre for a few hours and that is not going to be sufficient, he requires the same location to visit on consecutive days. It is extremely hard to get him out of the house."

Ms McCann continued: "I'm really worried because I find it difficult, we don't have any sleep and it's really left to me and my husband and it's really difficult to know we can't go out.

"10 years ago you would have received five days and transport, everybody is being let down here. I can't believe in this day and age this has happened."

Tina Henderson, who attended the protest on behalf of her son Robin, said she was a solo mum and had "no support whatsoever"

"I'm here today because I'm frustrated.

"I got four hours respite all summer, I'm dreading the future of being just stuck at home."

She told it is "very hard" for her son to adapt to other areas and he has to feel secure to go through with any changes.

"It's pretty hard. I've already talked to a few MLAs- there's no services, no rest, there is no support for my son whatsoever and things needs to change."

Ms Henderson explained politicians don't know because "they aren't in our world… if they knew they would see the struggles, nobody sees it unless you're in this world".

What is there for children with SEN in NI?

There are approximately 70,000 SEN pupils in Northern Ireland and 29,000 of them have an official statement detailing the support they require.

Now, a child can be given a statement of SEN, a legal document outlining the support they should have, in school.

A statement - and the provision it requires - ceases when a child goes out of school, as opposed to remaining until age 25.

By comparison, in England an education, health and care plan (EHCP) sets out a young person's special educational needs until the age of 25.

It is a legal document, which also sets out the extra support they require in education or training and the outcomes they wish to attain.

But an EHCP is only for young people in England, although there has been a criticism that some councils do not complete deadlines outlined in the plan. 

In Wales and Scotland, there have been recent changes to assist young people with SEN to move on from school.

The Department for the Economy has estimated that demand for such services in Northern Ireland has increased by 134% over the course of the last twenty years.

Establishing an e-commerce company in Dubai, India-based D2C brand, a 'kickstarter' in Singapore and Malaysia and businesses in Ghana, the US, Argentina and Europe --- this is not a wishlist of a businessman but part of the four-year undergraduate syllabus at the Tetr College of Business here.

B-school launched by education entrepreneur Pratham Mittal this week inducted its second batch of students.

The initial batch of 110 students created 44 businesses in Dubai and India, clocking more than USD 300,000 in revenues. Startups like ServeClub (pickleball equipment) and CosMoss (sea moss supplements) received angel funding from large investors.

Tetr's flagship four-year Bachelor's in Management and Technology programme transports students to India, Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia, Ghana, the US, Argentina, and Europe, uniting academics with practical entrepreneurial experience.

Though the students get degrees from the UK's Middlesex University, the programme's base camp is located in Dubai.

"This is an undergraduate programme where we are attempting to get past exams, lectures, slides, grades, attendance and books, which is what students typically do. In every term, instead of sitting in classes all day and writing exams, students are asked to start a business every semester which is mapped out in a different nation," Mittal explained to PTI.

"So, they would have to create an e-commerce business in Dubai. Then they will travel to India where they will establish a D2C brand. Then they will proceed to Singapore where they actually need to create a Kickstarter," he explained.

"Then term four, they have to create a new business in Malaysia and subsequently in Ghana, US and Europe.  Instead of their marks or grades, their revenue, margin and profit are the actual metrics by which they are measured," he said.

Mittal said the B-school has collaborated with top institutions — such as IITs in India, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Cornell University in the US — to provide academic modules, while its curriculum mandates that students start businesses in various markets every semester.

"The seven countries the students visit and the seven countries the seven countries are selected in such a manner that half of them would be developed nations and half of them would be developing nations. So, they experience the whole world, the whole diversity," he said.

"Four years over, students will have traversed seven regions acquiring skills to launch hardware products in Singapore, access Silicon Valley's tech ecosystem, and establish D2C businesses in India. In the process, they will learn at top institutions like IIT (India), NUS (Singapore) and Cornell (US), interweaving projects with top-class academics.".

"They will be mentored by a world-class faculty and mentor pool from MIT, Harvard, NASA and Airtel. In place of traditional grades, Tetr assesses students on actual business results - revenue growth, customer acquisition and market reach," he added.

The Class of 2029 at Tetr comprises 200 students from 50 countries, twice the size of last year's founding cohort.

The group includes an American speed skating and swimming national competitor who invented 3D-printed biodegradable shoes, a German 3D designer and video editor with clients including Forbes 30 Under 30, and a Mexican tennis prodigy and best-selling author.

An Indian kickboxer adds to the mix, alongside a Saudi racer stepping up to Formula 4 with sponsorships.

Other notable profiles include a Qatari youth entrepreneur leading 10,000+ in e-commerce, a Portuguese student admitted to Carnegie Mellon and MIT, and a Brazilian tutoring founder scaling AI for business applications.

Combined, these students embody Tetr's aspiration to develop globally-oriented builders who are poised to bring innovative ideas to life as impactful ventures.

"With an average SAT score of 1490, a number of students rejected offers from top-tier universities like Carnegie Mellon, MIT, King's College London, Northeastern University, UMass Boston, University of Warwick, and the University of Washington to become Tetr.".

"The batch comprises nine national-level players from cricket, football, kickboxing, go-karting, jiu-jitsu, golf, and gymnastics and has a combined social media following of more than one million. Thirty per cent of the batch has already tested their entrepreneurial waters," he said.

Mittal, whose Rajya Sabha MP dad Ashok Mittal founded Punjab-based Lovely Professional University, is also the brains behind India-based B-school, Masters' Union, launched in September 2021.

A Wharton School of Business graduate, Mittal explained, "We have witnessed huge momentum since the launch of our first cohort. Not only did students create more than 44 real ventures in their very first year but also proceeded to raise money from eminent investors."