We need to reform our higher education programs.

I don't know about your school Beth, but when I was in grad school (and undergrad) the education was multi-faceted. Sure there was classroom work but in Engineering-Physics labs were just as important as grades. When I was a senior, my E&M professor handed me a Lumer-Gerke plate they got in and said it was flawed. He asked me to design a lab experiment to calibrate it and validate it. That was it! I was on my own. Of course, I could use the library, grad students and professors for help and advice, but it was a real world project with a real world objective. Most majors have this sort of experience in colleges. That's why we still have the best university system (overall) in the world.

In med school students often shadow doctors in hospitals. They have a really long internship before they can go into practice. I'm not sure where the beef is.

Interesting to hear your perspective. I have hired many college graduates over the years and fully suspected that what you mention was the case.

Back in the day we focused on something called "critical thinking". Whether our course work involved math, english, humanities, science, whatever..all courses required the ability to identify and solve problems. We had to be able to formulate and justify positions on various subjects. We had to be able to communicate our logic in succint and easy to understand ways. We had to be able to understand and argue various aspects of a scenario. We were REQUIRED to take positions contrary to our belief and argue their merits. NOTA was often a choice on multiple choice exams but many of the professors also required that we provide the right answer (in math) or a counter answer with substantiation in other cases.

College was a place where rote memorization simply was no longer good enough. It was a place where a synopsis of someone elses opinion wasn't good enough. There were, admittedly, some classes where you could get an "A" by simply telling the professor that you agreed with them and thought they were brilliant but, fortunately, they were few and far between.