When I started school, they told us that 4 years of busting your ass in engineering will do nothing but prepare you to start learning when you get a job. Back in 1st year, I thought they were just trying to scare us noobs, but only after a few years did I realize how right they were. There is such a dizzlingly wide array of things to learn, you can't do much except learn the basics.<p>As if learning the basics of your field isn't time consuming enough, companies now want universities to do their job on top of this as well. Sorry, but that's a bit like demanding that someone teach wisdom - it just ain't gonna happen.<p>This is just companies whining and looking for ways to offload costs. The missing skills they're complaining about can be developed very quickly (6 months to a year) by any competent grad that's put in a challenging-enough position. The problem is, such positions are a bit hard to find - when the days of paternalistic companies went away, so did the idea of hiring, training and investing in new grads, and too many of the internships and coops that are out there now are just cheap crap work.