Hmm.
I've been thinking about the job situation in the US (possibly elsewhere, but I don't know enough about other economies to say). for a while. I think that a huge part of the problem is that manufacturing jobs and other skilled labor jobs have been shipped overseas. So people who would otherwise have taken union-type jobs now have no other choice but to seek white collar jobs. This fact is probably driving the everyone-must-go-to-college mindset. People have no choice: there are fewer jobs requiring skilled labor, ergo many people must move into white collar jobs or work in relatively unskilled and poorly-paid service jobs.
So it's really no surprise that employers have trouble finding "good" employees. There probably aren't enough intelligent people to fill them all and the employers may be doing the best they can to find people who can do the work.
I'm not saying that the other factors we've discussed here aren't also problems. I'm just saying that what I've described is one more (big) problem.
