A majority of colleges at least in my country are built on principle of preparing people for jobs. Nothing wrong with that. However it often becomes the corner stone of why one would join a college. The college courses are often old, unchanged and uninspiring. They are meant to provide students as much knowledge as possible in shortest amount of time.
The real world unfortunately demands something different. It demands skills that are unique and that are contemporary. The skills provided by colleges are often from few years back. Since the whole world is witnessing unprecedented slowdown, jobs that repetitive in nature are either disappearing fast or that there is huge competition for the limited numbers. The reducing number of jobs and increasing number of graduates indicates a crisis. Some kind of jobs will disappear leaving people holding those skills redundant.
The best way out of such a quagmire is by encouraging entrepreneurship. Starting small and building up business is a long term thing. Colleges need to impart training in entrepreneurship right from the start. That means the curriculum needs to be overhauled and the emphasis needs to be on generating ideas and bringing them to reality.
This raises a question that if everyone becomes an entrepreneur how difficult it would be get employees for the workforce. The answer is that not everyone who gets skills will become entrepreneurs or start a business. Most of them will probably want to work for someone else rather than on their own. However a few who start their own ventures would create jobs that employs many. There will be failures but each failure will teach far more lessons than just reading textbooks. The entrepreneurship culture will bring venture capitalists and others interested to incubate the ventures.
The study course should emphasize on practical learning rather than rote. For students it means learning only what they want and getting a specialization. Add business knowledge such as soft skills, selling skills and others to it. Thus it becomes a potent weapon to combat the lack of jobs. It will rather create new jobs that will bring prosperity to everyone.
Difficult times call for change in mind-set and it can only come when everyone responds to challenges in the correct manner and when they break the old habits.