I have a good idea of what this is on about, and honestly I'm surprised it hasn't come up sooner. As a working software engineer and former president of my college's gaming club, I've seen some fairly atrocious examples of poor social awareness, and I'm talking about more than just failing to bathe regularly.
The gaming club holds weekly meetings that basically amount to a bunch of TVs set up with consoles and games for people to jump into. For a good 2 years, we had one kid who brought in his own PS2 with Capcom vs SNK 2, and spent the entire meeting sitting by himself playing on Training mode. Occasionally someone would come by and play a match with him, but most meetings he would sit on his own for the full 3 hours. Every week. For 2 years.
One time we had Guitar Hero 3 set up, and one guy got on it and failed the opening to "Through the Fire and Flames" a good 50 times in a row. Listening to the same opening bar of a song I never liked in the first place repeated over and over was extremely annoying. We told him this. He continued playing. A bit later we warned him that if didn't cut it out, we'd pull the plug and send him off. He didn't stop. We pulled the plug and told him to leave. He literally threw down the guitar controller (lucky for him it wasn't damaged) and started shouting, acting indignant, and overall throwing a tantrum.
We've had occasions of people demanding refunds for their tournament fees after being eliminated, claiming some complaint about our rules (which were clearly available for them to read before they entered).
And this sort of behavior definitely transfers to the office. A friend of mine had a co-op (basically a paid internship) with IBM this past year, working on the Lotus Symphony program suite. He was assigned to work with another co-op on making a calculator plugin. Now this guy knew programming, and he really knew calculators (and would often brag that he owns more than 100 calculators). But whenever the project needed some sort of graphical work done, this guy would have to go to the graphics design people and tell them what he needs. From what I gather, he was completely incapable of clearly explaining what it was that he wanted, and when the graphic he received wasn't exactly what he had pictured in his head he would berate and insult the designer. On at least one occasion he made someone cry by shouting at them. It got to the point where the graphics designers outright refused to work with him. He was eventually fired for this.
This is what they mean by 'basic social skills'. It's not a matter of whether they'll go out and get drunk with the guys; it's a matter of being able to understand the concept that other people have needs and emotions, and that ignoring or disregarding the needs and emotions of others is rude. Now by the time these folks are in college, this behavior will be fairly difficult to fix, but by forcing them to be lectured on it and grading them on their ability to play nice, it is possible to curb the more drastic problems.
On the other side, there are of course the people who are simply introverted who've never been good at speaking with others or expressing themselves clearly. I was like that back when I started college. Forcing myself to interact with the gaming club did wonders for my public speaking and overall ability to interact socially. I still wouldn't go out drinking with the guys, and I generally keep to myself at my cube, but now if someone approaches me at work to start a conversation, or to ask about something work-related, I'm perfectly able to respond to them in a way that they understand and we can get along just fine - and to a business, that means productivity, which is all they really want from you.
So in conclusion, these sort of classes are a good thing, and given the rise of online social networks I honestly feel that most schools would do good to require that students learn about proper real-world human interaction.
