Click on CareerBuilder.com for jobs in Michigan and you’ll think you’ve landed in a time warp. Surprise! The auto industry is hiring — bunches of people, in fact. Car makers are not hiring people who build cars, but they are hiring designers and engineers. Foreign auto companies have recently been opening design centers in the Detroit region, taking advantage of that city’s advanced state of the art.

We find this reassuring. Isn’t this the way American industry is supposed to be heading? We may be exporting assembly line jobs to Korea or China (and, actually, to the southern part of this country), but we are replacing those jobs with new ones in the service sector. Substituting, as it were, brains for brawn.

After all, where does America still have unrivalled leadership? In innovative design, we are told, and we hope it is true. Surely a country as mighty as ours cannot continue to lead the world by dint of our ability to create entertainment like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, or to devise ever-more-clever coffee bars.

However, a new report out from the Conference Board and three other organizations throws a little rain on our parade. The report contains the findings of a detailed survey of 431 human resource officials who were asked about the readiness of new entrants to the American workforce.

The conclusion? “The future workforce is here, and it is ill-prepared.”

Oops. So much for our complacency, and intellectual leadership. It turns out that employers view most high school graduates (and a high percentage of two-year college grads) as lacking basic communications skills, as well as critical thinking capabilities. The head of the Conference Board, Richard Cavanaugh, is quoted as saying, “This ultimately makes the American economy more vulnerable in the global marketplace.”

Indeed it does, and it may be that this study will finally get corporate America energized about the sorry state of American education. Donna Klein, head of Corporate Voices for Working Families, and one of the participants in the survey, says that we need a more systemic approach to revamping the public school system. She thinks that the corporate sector needs to partner with the public sector in addressing our schools’ deficiencies, and to that end the report’s authors will be hosting a gathering of all the “stakeholders” later this year. She agrees that when given the proper incentives, corporate America is pretty effective.

Why is this an issue today? According to Linda Barrington, one of the authors of the report, for some time the Conference Board has been receiving increasing hints of concern about the new crop of workers emerging from school. The suggestion that many high school and even college graduates are incapable of writing a coherent memo, or lack professionalism, is especially relevant now, Ms. Barrington points out, because of the impending retirement of millions of Baby Boomers, who will take their skills with them.

“The gap is so large,” Ms. Barrington says, “that it can’t be filled by the efforts of a foundation here, or a not-for-profit there.” She says that numerous business organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, are becoming active on the education front, prompted by similar observations.

So what were the shortcomings revealed by the survey? Fully 81% of the respondents complained about the inability of high school graduates to communicate in writing. Spending two or four years in college does not appear to alleviate this problem, though the numbers do improve.

High school graduates are also given poor grades for professionalism and work ethic, with 70.3% of those surveyed citing these areas as deficiencies. A similar number conclude that high school graduates are weak in critical thinking and oral communications.

Not to be totally negative, the survey also asked in which areas the different scholastic levels excelled. The sobering response was that high school graduates were not found to have any “excellent” skills at all, while a small percentage thought that graduates from two year colleges were excellent at the application of information technology. A larger number were impressed with the information technology skills of four-year college graduates. Welcome to the Nintendo generation.

Not surprisingly, the survey’s respondents were positive that their hiring over time would gravitate toward college graduates. This raises some interesting questions. Either there will have to be a greater number of young people who are able to access a college degree, or we will see an increasing young and uneducated underclass, furthering economic and social divides. The latter is not an attractive prospect.

According to Ms. Barrington, “The business community does not see itself as having primary responsibility for solving education problems.” As she points out, most corporations today can move their manufacturing where it is most economic, and data processing and paperwork to where it is most efficient. The exporting of jobs is not limited to manufacturing, but has also included software engineering, the reading of medical x-rays, accounting and other service sector activities where we should be competitive. There is some buzz in the legal community that firms may soon have much of the “boiler plate” document creation and review shipped overseas. She argues that perceptions about the American workforce will influence how those decisions are made.

These concerns do not constitute futuristic or theoretical hand-wringing. They are also not new. As the Baby Boomer generation begins to retire, there may well be a significant deterioration in the abilities of the workforce. This has serious ramifications. Let’s hope that the business community will begin to apply their political and financial clout to providing some meaningful systemic change.

Otherwise, America could emerge as the world’s most overstaffed retirement community.