As I type, thousands of young protesters are camping out in Madrid to demonstrate their anger at Spain's appalling rate of youth unemployment, which stands at 45%. The protest, thankfully, has been peaceful so far, but needs to be taken seriously, not just by the Spanish government, but by all societies, including our own. The picture in the UK is almost as bad; recent news reports show that graduate unemployment in the UK is very high - the highest for 15 years. Official figures point to the fact that 20% of graduates were unemployed in late 2010 and data from the Office for National Statistics suggests that more than 45 students could be applying for each graduate job in 2011.
The inevitable official response will be that this is all a consequence of the international recession and we'll just have to live with it. There will, however, be other consequences, and they need to be thought about carefully.
The most obvious consequence will be the waste of human resources. Having so many intelligent people on the dole is not going to help us out of the recession. Far from it - we need them in work to help us OUT of this dire economic situation.
Another effect will be to push graduates into work for which they are over-qualified. You don't need a B.A. in Medieval Studies to serve burgers at Macdonalds, and is another example of how human resources can be wasted. But this will have an impact in another unwelcome way. The more graduates pushed into unskilled work will lead to less job opportunities for non-graduate young people,even more of whom will be unemployed.
There will be knock-on effects throughout the education system, also. Young people will be questioning the need to go into Higher Education (I'm told that many are doing so already). The universities themselves will be adversely affected by a reduction in student numbers. Many degree courses and even departments may need to close.
It will also have a negative impact on schools. After all, if there's no point in taking a degree, why work hard at "A" levels or GCSEs? Hopefully, that level of demoralisation will not set in anywhere, but if it does, well, here's a story...
Some years ago, back in the so-called Thatcherite boom years, I met a secondary school teacher who'd moved from London to the West Country. Having taught in some tough schools in South London, she thought she'd seen everything. She was wrong. She found that for young people in the town she lived in, there were only three career choices: university, the armed forces or the dole. In this woman's own words:
"I had far worse discipline problems than ever I had in London".
Is this to be the future?
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Instead of going to university, why don't people learn skills, we have a shortage of skilled people in the UK and we are importing them from overseas to fulfill our needs. At my workplace we have started apprenticeships for young people in order that we can train them into what we require. We only employ one graduate because we don't need them.
ReplyDeleteI took a four-year Bachelor of Education course and left college in 1977 qualified to teach both in secondary and primary schools. My secondary subjects were English and History, neither of which were shortage subjects, so I was unable to get a permanent job in teaching. In the three years after I left college I had three temporary jobs, interspersed with 18 months on the dole, and ended up in the civil service.
ReplyDeleteI had wanted to teach, but ended doing a job for which my degree was irrelevant. While I'm not complaining about how things have worked out, you could regard my degree course as being wasted. I don't from a personal point of view - I wanted to study to degree level - but the state never got much return on its investment in me as a teacher.
This was during the decline of the 70s, before Thatcher's deliberate driving of Britain into a slump, and unemployment went up to around 5 million (in real terms, not official figures) - things got even worse for the students who followed me.
The point is that graduate unemployment is nothing new. What is different now is that, unlike in my time, students will graduate with perhaps £27,000 of debt, whereas I had an overdraft of about £35 when I left. In the 80s, some people went to college as an alternative to being unemployed and knowing a job afterwards wasn't guaranteed; but the crippling debt today's students will end up with, combined with high graduate unemployment, means that studying as an alternative to unemployment is an unattractive option. You might as well be on the dole and owe nothing than be on the dole and owe £27,000. It's therefore almost certain that student applications will decline.
Austerity measures have no answer to this problem. British politicians tend to think the British public will accept anything with a few grumbles, but they're forgetting their history. I'm not talking about the 17th century when we executed one king and deposed another. It was popular revolt against the poll tax (including a mass campaign for non-payment) that drove Thatcher from power. The recent resurgence of student demonstrations, combined with at least half a million demonstrating on 26 March, are an indication that the British are not willing to take everything lying down. Even Southport has its own anti-cuts campaign - they're springing up all over the country, and will continue to do so as the abstract of cuts that most people reluctantly accept in principle turns into the reality of losing valuable public services and amenities, and your kids being on the dole, with or without a degree.
As an aside: the Thatcher boom years (you rightly say "so-called") were a con; there were whole swathes of the population who were untouched by her privatisation-driven boom. I worked in the DSS in Liverpool throughout all but 14 months of Thatcher's rule; there was no boom there.
Chas's comment appeared while I was writing mine; he makes a good point.
ReplyDeleteWhy does this country have a target of 50% of all young people going to university? I have never read any credible rationale for this aim, the only result of which I can see is young people get degrees that won't help them, while turning their noses up at what we used to call "trades", where there are shortages that are met from abroad.
I have a lot of sympathy with what you say, chaps - it's probably the first time ever that we've all been in agreement about anything. The problem I have with encouraging people to take up "trades" is that, as with graduates, we assume that there will be jobs for them when they finish their apprenticeships. Back in the mid-60s, 50% of UK workers were emloyed in manufacturing industry; nowadays it's about 15%. As most trades are factory-based, that doesn't really make for a viable option. Also - what trades are we talking about here? I don't suppose training as a cooper or french polisher is any more likely to lead to employment than a degree in Anthropology. I would think that Chas, when he talks about trades, means engineering skills-based work. But, again - how much demand is there for such tradesmen (and women)? After all, large manufacturers have been moving their operations to the Far East, where labour costs are lower, ever since Mrs Thatcher's glory days in the 1980s - bit of a coincidence that.
ReplyDeleteNev - I agree that, if the aim of higher education is to get people into suitable employment, sending 50% of the population to university is impractical. But wasn't the ideal of an educated workforce part of the aims of all post-war Labour Governments? And, are we not in danger of devaluing education if we reduce it to mere vocational training? We do not live by bread alone, and there should always be a place for the Arts and Social Sciences. I read Politics and History, and found it to be an invaluable experience. Part of the reason why West Germany's economy recovered so quickly after the war (not forgetting the Marshall Plan) was because they had a well-educated workforce.
There is no doubt that the country is in a mess at all levels. People are being forced to work until they are much older, thus tying up jobs which used to become available to the young. The young see very little point in amassing debt to become educated. And so on.... Money is wasted on 'recovery projects' in all aspects of the workplace, I include education, government, councils, banking, large organisations and it is necessary that basic concepts are tackled with forethought in order to 'get things right'. Perhaps to start the ball rolling some serious auditing should take place.
ReplyDeleteI don't think anything I wrote suggested that all education should be vocational. Industry has declined certainly, but skilled workers have never been confined purely to factories. Obvious examples might include plumbers, joiners, electricians, builders, glaziers, caterers or hairdressers.
ReplyDeleteLooking back over what I wrote, I found that I'd only looked at graduate unemployment, not youth unamployment. I found this quote in the Guardian:
ReplyDelete"The total number of adults under 25 who are out of work moved close to the 1 million mark in the three months to November, rising by 32,000 to 951,000. This pushed the youth unemployment rate up to 20.3%, which is also the highest level since records began in 1992."
Then this:
"Youth unemployment is becoming an increasingly serious global problem, with the number of under-25s out of work worldwide recently estimated at 81 million".
To paraphase the Kaiser Chiefs _ I predict a lot of riots.
Typical skills that are in short supply are Welders, not people who weld bits of cars together but hi tech Plasma welding, Tungston Inert Gas and Manual Metallic Arc which is used in heavy engineering. Most people I see in our training facility are over 40 and a lot of them speak Polish.
ReplyDelete