Our educational and economic institutions of the future are more likely to be disrupted in the future by the millions of young people around the world unable to find meaningful employment in a timely fashion. After all, people are much less likely to see institutions as infallible when they weren’t very helpful.
José Manuel Salazar, Executive Director of the International Labor Organization reports that youth unemployment around the world is between 2.5 and 3.0 times higher than those of older, more experienced adults. He gives a variety of reasons, from lack of financial resources to move for work, to the fact that employers in times of strife can choose from more experienced talent.
This trend meets with another trend as we go forward, the increase of the cost of education. In the United States, four-year universities have increased in price between three and four times in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, within 30 years. That means young people coming out with more debt than ever, needing real employment in their fields making good money as soon as possible to begin to offload the heavy yoke of that obligation.
Those young people need work more than ever and aren’t finding it. Why then will they continue to believe that $50,000 per year universities are necessarily the way to success? How many of them are going to be faced with modern indentured servitude, unable to walk away from those debts no matter what the outcome?
The system is frontloading too much risk onto the youth of the industrialized world, and that risk is not resulting in increased returns as it might in other types of investment. Who will blame them if they can imagine a system of learning and work that does not involve a multi-billion dollar educational-financial cartel?
