It's not "skills". It's "skills at the cost we want". Market forces will generally bring people with skills when the pay rate is high enough. If skills are so important, why not have a company train a person for the job?
They could subsidize education and 'guarantee' a job at IBM upon graduation. And shift the curriculum as needed for the company, provided they give a typical core education that you would find at any typical 4 yr college.
Heck if they get a D1 football school they can pump a bunch of money into it and leverage the exposure for advertising.
About 75-85% of the mentors were in fact from IBM, and the rest of us were from marketing agencies. IBM is very, very highly represented at many of these sites and have enormous skin in the game to propagate the model further. See here: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_innovation/2017/04/ibm_pre...
Now that IBM has a few years under their belt supporting said academies, and some analytics to determine whether it's benefiting them or not, they're pushing it to the next level.
I thought, "the academy needs my perspective! They don't understand that they're failing!" Turns out, it's not so much that they don't know as they aggressively don't care. I went to quite a number of "prepare youself to be a professor" talks in grad school at Big State U. Every single one of them presented teaching as a huge time suck and offered strategies for mitigating it. When I tried to explain my motivations to my advisor, he laughed in my face and told me I didn't get it. I finished the Ph.D., but I got the heck out of academia, sadder but wiser.
The academy would be a lot better off trying to do vocational training, because at least then it would be trying to do anything at all to prepare young people for life. You can get a great education at today's university, but nobody cares if you don't.
The majority of American Universities are failing. They are becoming irrelevant at an alarming rate unless of course your interested in Modern Dance and Italian Art History.
Instead they force their version of what you need to know to keep a tenured prof working.
University should start treating students like customers and not like they are doing you a favor.
The days of these backwards and obsolete institutions are numbered. More and more companies don't care if you have a degree because they have realized it proves nothing. They want to know what skills you have and what you have accomplished, not what grade you received in modern dance and Intro to Computers 101.
Haven't you noticed that the main complaint today from corporations are the Universities aren't teaching the skills kids need to know to be successful in Technology.
Yeah, I've noticed, and I think it betrays a wrongheaded conception of what universities ought to be (namely, vocational schools to which companies can outsource employee training on the student's dime). The idea of students as "customers" is also wrongheaded, in my view (although you're far from alone in having it).
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/09/why_dont_wages.h... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/how_can_there_b....