after three years of computer science education they can’t code

Given the skills shortage one would expect graduates from computer science courses to have very high employment rates. However, it seems that is not the case. The Higher Education Statistics Agency found that computer science graduates have “the unwelcome honour of the lowest employment rate of all graduates.” Why is this? Anecdotally there seems to be a mismatch between the skills the students graduate with and those that employers expect them to have. Or more bluntly, after three years of computer science education they can’t code. A comment on this article by an anonymous university lecturer has some interesting insights:

“Every year it's the same - no more than a third of them [CS students] are showing the sort of ability I would want in anyone doing a coding job. One-third of them are so poor at programming that one would be surprised to hear they had spent more than a couple of weeks supposedly learning about it, never mind half-way through a degree in it. If you really test them on decent programming skills, you get a huge failure rate. In this country it's thought bad to fail students, so mostly we find ways of getting them through even though they don't really have the skills.”

http://mikehadlow.blogspot.de/2015/12/learn-to-code-its-harder-than-you-think.html