I Told the Department of Education Their Graduates Were Useless

The room went silent. But I'd been watching this crisis unfold for decades—starting on a factory floor in 1981

Nothing like telling the Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education that what America’s colleges were producing was useless to me—to get a room excited.

It was 2009, at the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto. I was the only person from industry at a long conference table surrounded by about two dozen educators—Jim Shelton (Department of Education), pr…