While the prevalent national narrative is that there is a troubling skills gap among college-educated workers in the US labor market, analysis conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers questions whether the skills gap is as pervasive as it is cast to be.

In a NACE Journal article titled “Is There Really a Skills Gap?”, Edwin Koc, NACE’s director of research, public policy, and legislative issues, writes that this perceived “skills gap” has become an issue for higher education for two reasons:

• While certain “middle-class” jobs were filled in the past more frequently than not by those with a high school or some post-secondary education, they are now jobs for which employers are nearly universally demanding candidates with bachelor’s degrees.
• The “skills gap” is frequently attributed to a failure of the US education system, and more and more the part of the education system that is increasingly being blamed for the skills shortage is our nation’s colleges and universities.

“Despite several employer-based assessments of the employment market, there is no credible supporting evidence of a national skills gap that would warrant a comprehensive national response in the way of radical reform of the American higher education system,” Koc said.

He states that hires have exceeded separations, and the openings they create, for every month since 2010. “A mass of jobs in the United States are not going unfilled; a relatively small fraction of job openings are taking longer than the desired time to fill,” he said.

He added that the existence of a national skills shortage is also belied by national wage data. Since the recession, wage increases have held steady in the 2.0% to 2.5% range.

“There has been no significant jump, nor has there been a noticeable blip, in the trend suggesting a tremendous increase in demand not capable of being met with the supply of available workers,” Koc said.

In his report, however, Koc wrote that there situations that result in skills shortages. These include when an employer’s location — particularly if it’s a rural location — makes finding the right skills difficult, employers aren’t willing to pay wages that would attract workers with the right skills, and rapidly changing technology requiring workers to constantly update their skills.