Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a number of letters in response to a recent article on the difficulty of finding skilled workers. Here is one:

Peter Cappelli suggests that companies are too rigid in their hiring requirements and are no longer training employees. However, corporations spend nearly $60 billion annually on training, according to Bersin & Associates, nearly equaling the federal government’s investment in education.
Skyrocketing remediation rates at community colleges are evidence of a real skills gap. If students can’t do college-level work, how can they succeed in the work force?
Cheryl Oldham
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Washington

To answer her question, I suspect that if most young Americans left high school with anything in the ballpark of acceptable basic skills in English and math, they could be trained for the jobs businesses need to fill. Unfortunately, even after remedial courses and a lot of college work, many are not much better.