If you're not studying stuff related to what you want to do when you get out of college, on your spare time during studies, you're already losing. It's not enough to come out as a grad. You need to set your sights on a very specific job, and start learning for it. All throughout my undergrad I studied mobile to death and did a ton of work in it. Had no problem landing a 150k+ job right out of undergrad, because I was incredibly skilled.

Not too many companies care about your GPA + the courses you did, the ones that do, will put you into a mediocre role loosely related to your profession since you have no specialty.

One more reason to work as a consultant/freelancer or for a small business (startups included). In these settings you have a lot of control over the tech stack and can optimize your skills for the changing market. You can also devote whatever reasonable amount of time you need to learning new things as you go. In most of these environments, polyglots are rewarded and encouraged, which means much less career risk, since you can hit the ground running on a wider array of projects.

As a hiring manager, it happens very, very rarely that I encounter someone worth training.

When we're talking "crap" candidates, we're talking a complete lack of both talent and passion. It would be a waste of time and effort to try to train these people.

Education is part of the problem. I don't expect higher education to result in immediately applicable job skills, but I do expect it to weed out the fundamentally incompetent.

My first job out of high school (*with only O levels) was at a r&d organization in the math modeling section.

My first day was a hours instruction on the pdp11/03 then I was told to goto the company library get the book they had on FORTRAN and learn it.

You make it sound like competency is a bad thing. What a sad state when people don't value it and think it is someone else's responsibility to provide it for them.

"clueless line and project managers..." is an ad hominem and doesn't support your argument.