Bostonian, sorry-- my statement was reflecting the high rates of unemployment in those with (recent)college degrees but who lack work experience, and yes, there does seem to be a similar cost-shifting trend behind it.
Applicants are expected to already have the skills necessary to peform any job that they are applying for. Not the "potential" for them. Employers expect previous training to have taken care of those up-front investments in time and money.
Similar driving force behind it, I suspect. Which is in line (entirely) with your second statement.
The era of industrial R&D as it existed in the 1960's-1980's is completely long-gone. (As my DH could tell you with a great deal of cynicism, by the way, as he works for one of the companies that was once a powerhouse there and now cares only about the quickest route to a quick buck or protectable intellectual property.)
That same driving force is present in modern pharmaceutical
R&D; a quick examination of patent patterns there reveals this. Why go to the trouble of screening an entire library of compounds when you can just do a single tweak of a fully-characterized compound and have another five or ten years of patent on it?
