Is there a "skills gap"?

This morning's Chronicle of Higher Education offers a long and intriguing article on this very question.  The thesis of this piece is that "skills gap" means different things to different people and may be used for questionable purposes, such as justifying funding for pet projects.

If companies decide to require bachelor's degrees for jobs that didn't used to require a college education, is that a genuine skills gap?  Well, not really.  As the article indicates, many executive assistant jobs now call for a BA, while most current incumbents don't have the credential.

Then there are the so-called "soft skills," such as speaking, writing, quantitative reasoning and information literacy.  The lore in higher ed is that employers are crying out for more graduates with these generalized abilities.

And what about the reverse of the skills gap?   That's when an English major fresh out of college works as a barista, for instance.  Is that lad over-skilled for the position?  Or does his education make him a more interesting service worker, who can enhance his tips by charming his customers?

If "skills gap," per the Chronicle headline, has launched a thousand strategic plans, it also has piled blame on our schools and colleges for failing to plug the perceived fissure.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the living room --- but not in the Chronicle story --- is in my mind automation.  Call it "AI," which sounds sexier or "robotics", which probably doesn't.  It seems to me that automation is destroying more jobs than it's creating.  And this may mean an ever-growing underclass of the chronically unemployed, if I am right.

While we in the US may be focused on the alleged "skills gap," other countries, notably in Europe are hotly debating the concept of a guaranteed salary to meet the latter, and more troubling, issue.  Here's a Wikipedia piece on "guaranteed minimum income" and how it has fared globally and temporally.

Last year Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected such a program.  But the Scandinavian countries, as might be expected, are more open to the idea.  And in other countries, such as Ireland, the dole is already a way of life for some.

Bottom line, as is so often the case, our species surges ahead in the fields of science and technology, while economists and social scientists are left  scratching their heads and arguing about what the impact of IT and other advances will be on our species and our societies.  We accept technological advances as inevitable and call anyone who resists them a "Luddite."

The real skills gap may be the yawning crevasse between technology, on the one hand, and public policy, dependent upon social science at best and political ideology at worst, on the other.