Nearly 20 years of AAC&U employer surveys confirm that employers value the development that general education promotes. Critical thinking, problem solving, communication, teamwork, and adaptability are some of the skills identified by employers as important, and these are often listed as the goals of general education programs. Despite this focus and apparent connection between general education and employment, according to a 2025 Indeed survey, 60 percent of graduates think they could perform their work responsibilities just as well without a degree, and 36 percent think their degrees were a waste of time. Additionally, in a 2025 Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) survey, employers highlight that graduates could be better prepared in areas such as oral and written communication, teamwork, critical thinking, applying knowledge to real-world settings, and other areas.
Chief academic officers (CAOs) should be concerned about graduates’ perceptions about the value of the degree and the preparedness gap identified by employers. The problem is not that general education lacks value. The problem is that the way most institutions design general education disconnects it from post-graduation success and obscures that value from the very people it is supposed to serve.
If you are a chief academic officer, here are five questions worth asking about your general education program and its relationship to employability.
1. Can students explain why they are taking general education courses?
Most general education programs are built as distribution requirements. Students choose from a menu of courses across categories, complete the credits, and move on. The logic may be clear to faculty, but it is rarely clear to students.
When general education requirements are not connected to a purpose, students experience them as arbitrary. One student at Indiana University put it plainly: She could not understand why, as a PR journalism major, she was required to take science and math courses that seemed unrelated to her career. Her frustration is not unusual for students who do not see the point of general education.
The question is not whether students should take general education. It is whether they can see the connection between the general education courses they are required to take and the institutional mission. Institutions like Sweet Briar College have addressed this by strongly connecting their general education program to their institutional mission (Leadership Core). Not every institution needs that model, but every institution needs students to see the connection to its mission.
2. Do students have opportunities to bring together the disciplines they encountered in their general education program?
General education typically consists of individual courses in individual disciplines. Students complete them one at a time and rarely, if ever, integrate what they have learned across them. But the problems students will face after graduation, whether in the workplace, in their communities, or in their personal lives, are multidisciplinary.
Most general education programs never provide students with the opportunity to employ the different disciplinary perspectives they encounter in general education to a real-world problem. If students graduate without ever having done this, not only will they not see the value of general education but they will not be prepared to apply these disciplinary perspectives when they graduate.
3. Can your students share with an employer the skills, attributes, and professional habits they possess?
This may be the most important question of the five. General education develops many of the skills, attributes, and professional habits employers say they want. But students often cannot name them, employers cannot see them on transcripts, and faculty do not always share a common language for what they are collectively developing.
A 2024 Inside Higher Ed survey found that 84 percent of students say their education is valuable, but only 7 percent agree that higher education in general offers good value for its cost. Students sense they are learning something important. They just cannot articulate what it is or why it matters in terms of employment, which is why they do not think their education is a good value for the cost. If your students cannot tell an employer how they developed through general education and other parts of the student experience, that is not a marketing problem. It is a design problem.
Institutions like Minerva University have addressed this by replacing vague learning outcomes with specific, observable competencies that guide faculty practice and that students can articulate. The QA Commons Essential Employability Qualities framework offers another approach. The specific framework matters less than having one that is specific, informs curricula and other educational activities, and makes clear to students how they are developing.
4. Are you designing for skills alone, or also for attributes and professional habits?
Employer surveys consistently highlight skills like critical thinking and communication. But recent AAC&U survey results reveal something broader: employers increasingly treat attributes like motivation, resilience, curiosity, and self-awareness as baseline expectations. The 2025 AAC&U survey found that ninety-five percent of employers say motivation and initiative are important.
Employability is not just about skills. It is about skills, attributes, and professional habits that together enable graduates to contribute meaningfully in the workplace. When faculty design a course, a useful exercise is to ask these questions: What skills am I developing? What attributes am I cultivating? What professional habits am I reinforcing? If you are only thinking about skills, you are missing essential components of employability. It is also worth asking whether faculty are prepared to connect their coursework to employability.
5. Are you preparing students for today’s workforce, or for multiple possible futures of work?
There was a time when employers said everyone needed to learn to code because this would be the key to employment success. This led to the emergence of coding bootcamps and colleges and universities teaching coding. It suggests we have to be careful about relying on current workforce needs, especially for students in degree programs that can take four to six years.
Skills lists are valuable starting points. But they are backward-looking. They capture what employers valued yesterday and value today. They cannot tell us what employers will value in ten years as AI, automation, and globalization continue to reshape work.
Research on what will be essential to employability in the future is underdeveloped. The focus has been on the future of work. For example, Google Scholar returns approximately 219,000 results for “future of work” and approximately 75 for “future of employability.” It is helpful to explore the different ways work might change, but there needs to be an equal focus on the future of employability. Colleges and universities should be working with employers to explore how to prepare students for the different ways work may evolve. General education can play a fundamental role.
General education is the one part of the curriculum that touches every student. If designed properly, it can be the foundation of employability. But general education must be designed to prepare students for the world they will enter, not the one we remember. And it must take into account uncertainty related to the future of work. The five questions above are not meant to be a checklist. They are a guide to examine whether general education at your institution is optimized for the future of employability.
For many institutions, the next step is not another list of skills. It is a structured exploration of how general education, the major, co-curricular learning, assessment, work-integrated learning, and employer expectations fit together. Institutions need a way to examine where employability is already being developed, where it remains invisible to students, and where the student experience may need to be redesigned to prepare graduates for multiple possible futures of work.
If these questions raised concerns about your institution, I would welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation.