We hear over and over from the higher-education establishment that it’s imperative that we get more young people through college because it teaches them “higher skills” that the labor force needs.

As a counterweight, I suggest this Huffington Post piece by Dr. Robert Atkinson. He runs a think tank and reports that he is amazed at how poorly college graduates — even from supposedly elite institutions — perform on a simple writing task his organizations assigns to job applicants.

Atkinson says that the problem is that “colleges are focused on teaching kids content, not on teaching them skills.” OK, but I don’t think they’re all that focused on content either. Does the typical college student know much about our history? Literature? Political institutions? Lots of evidence shows that such knowledge is scanty. Atkinson is certainly right, though, in saying that colleges mostly neglect what is arguably the most basic skill of all, the ability to write clear English. For an excellent discussion on the reasons why college no longer succeeds at that (and hardly even tries), here is the video of a talk given today at the John Locke Foundation by North Carolina State English professor Robert V. Young.