Back in the depths of the Great Recession, employers said...

Back in the depths of the Great Recession, employers said that they wanted, needed, and required college graduates and the highly experienced. But what they meant was that they thought high unemployment meant that they could get overqualified workers when they went to the labor market. Now that unemployment has fallen, these needs and requirements have vanished.

Employers still want over-qualified workers. But they are no longer asking for them becuase they no longer expect to be able to get them:

Matthew Yglesias: The ���Skills Gap��� Was a Lie: "Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel Shoag, and Joshua Ballance... the skeptics were right... employers responded to high unemployment by making their job descriptions more stringent. When unemployment went down thanks to the demand-side recovery, suddenly employers got more relaxed again.... The skills gap was the consequence of high unemployment rather than its cause. With workers plentiful, employers got choosier. Rather than investing in training workers, they demanded lots of experience and educational credentials. And while job skills are obviously important, when the labor market is healthy employers have incentives to try to impart skills to workers rather than posting advertorial content about how the government should fix this problem for them...

#noted