As some 5,000 recent high school graduates in Vermont prepare to go off to college, it's not an academic question. When their bikes break, toilets clog or cars act up, will they have the ability to put things right?

Not necessarily, according to author Steve Elliott, who witnessed numerous acts of mechanical illiteracy in his own kids and their roommates during their college years.

"I realized something was going on my daughter's sophomore year when she called home because her key wouldn't work," Elliott said. "I told her to spray some WD-40 in the lock, and her response was, 'What's WD-40?' She's a smart young woman, but I knew right then that she wasn't mechanically prepared to be out on her own."

And it's not just her. Nationwide, about two million new college freshmen are entering a world many of them haven't been prepared for.

"Academic requirements are tougher today than ever before, especially for kids planning on college," Mr. Elliott explained "So that doesn't leave time to take wood shop or auto shop. And today most kids have parents who work at desks in offices, so they're less likely to learn mechanical basics at home, either."

Steve Elliott But the biggest culprit for what Mr. Elliott calls Mechanical Deficit Disorder is betterbuilt products.

"Things used to break and we expected them to break," Mr. Elliott said. "Cars had points that had to be regapped, TVs had tubes that had to be replaced. You knew they'd eventually stop working and you'd have to fix them. Today, that's not the case. Young people simply don't expect things to break, so they're not prepared when they do."

To fill the mechanical education gap for his own kids, Mr. Elliott wrote The Portable Dad: Fix-it Advice for When Dad's Not Around. The humorous how-to book is aimed at college students and 20-somethings (or anyone else who never had the chance to learn basic repair skills) and filled with practical advice on how to maintain and fix cars, computers, bicycles and apartments. It also has chapters on moving, painting, and taking care of a yard.

Running Press in Philadelphia saw the need for the book and published it in April.

"We felt The Portable Dad was a very timely book, and one that really meets an important national need," said Seta Bedrossian Zink of Running Press. "It's a book that gives young adults greater independence, and their parents greater peace of mind."

And that was Mr. Elliott's goal in the first place.

"Some people say this stuff should be common sense, but that's wrong," Mr. Elliott said. "No one is born knowing how often to change their oil or how to fix a flat. These things are learned. I wrote the book to do just that and cover the basics - they things everybody needs to know and do to take care of the stuff they own."