Last Mile Training: Is College Education Necessary?

We will cover in this post the concept. of last mile training. While it becomes very easy to get an online college degree at present, is college education really necessary? Are there other easier pathways to a successful career?

The concept of the last mile usually refers to the final portion of the connection to each home. The concept first originated in telecom, but is now a employed in particular by e-commerce and supply chain management.

To all those different contexts the general applicable principle is that the last mile is the most valuable, but equally the most expensive and difficult to build. For any player on the market, a strong competitive position can be achieved by dominating the last mile.

The cost of building the last mile in telecom and other utilities requires regulation in order to avoid forming natural monopolies.

The last mile phenomenon is emerging now in education, an unlikely setting. This emergence has three reasons:

1. There are dramatic changes in the hiring process

While online colleges are proliferating, there are some reasons why a college degree, whether taken online or in a more traditional setting might not provide as much as an edge on the job market as in the past years. Almost all positions in growing sectors of the economy and more than 85 percent of all job openings today are posted online. A typical job posting receives, as a result, around 200 applications. This number of CVs and resumes is too high for any hiring manager. In order to manage their hiring processes, most mid-size firms and all large employers have resorted to utilizing Applicant Tracking Systems such as the market leader Taleo from Oracle. These systems are designed to use a keyword match in order to filter applicants. Job applicants are matching mostly to technical skills that have come to outnumber non-cognitive and cognitive skills in nearly all industries’ job descriptions over the past decade.

While it is a product of a fact, it is easier to crop up with 10 various technical skill requirements compared to 10 various ways of saying “critical thinking” or “problem solving” that it does not matter to the Applicant Tracking Systems’ exacting keyword matching logic, which filters out job candidates without enough level of keyword match. This just means that majority of the candidates with a small number of technical skills are not visible to human hiring managers.

2. Students care and hope to get a good first job

One biggest single difference in higher education in last 10 years is the student percentage that says they are enrolling for career, job or income reasons. Currently, there are over 90 percent of students that gives this as the sole reason for going to university or college.

Some of this stems from the bad employment results experienced by college/university graduates in the time of the Great Recession. Majority of students have older friends or siblings who were underemployed for many years. Another reason is that students of this era have lack of experience with paid work that makes additional concern about getting a good first job. Finally, worries about having a good first job are certainly real: There are scarcer jobs that need college/university degrees without particular experience requirements, maybe because employers have already given up in expecting that new college or university graduates have the essential technical skills, and so they have begun demanding experience requirements. In effect, while entry-level sales positions 10 years ago had few or if any technical skill requirements, these same positions in the present day are probably to specify at least two years’ experience with sales force.

3. Universities and college have not revamped

Although the students in the present day do not believe it, a lot of universities and colleges continue to observe the old proverb: “We prepare you for your fifth job, not necessarily your first.” Thus, in spite of increasing acceptance that students are increasingly going to have a good fifth job if they do not get a good first job, there has been a small amount in the way of revamping curriculum to give consideration to employer needs as well as job-market realities. Course curriculum in lower level has not changed at all. Majority of departments offer similar lower-level courses that they have offered two or three decades ago. Meanwhile, courses in upper level continue to be dominated by faculty research priorities that run independently of labor-market demands.

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