What's Happening To The Graduates?

A week and a half ago, I sliced my finger instead of a piece of meat.  As it was late at night and there is an annex of Mount Sinai Hospital only a block and a half from my apartment, I went to the emergency room for stitches.  Today I returned to that same emergency room to have the sutures removed.


As I was filling out paperwork, the Registrar and I got to talking.  He's British--a Londoner, as I noted from his accent.  I haven't been there in some time, but I've spent enough time there to be able to discern regional accents.  Plus, one of my aunts hails from the North (near Manchester) and returned there after my uncle died.


He's young, handsome and--as it turns out--a graduate of the London School of Economics.  I've known un- and under-employed graduates of Ivy League and near-Ivy schools, but somehow seeing an LSE graduate working the counter of a hospital annex really shocked me.  But then he reminded me of something my cousin has told me:  the employment situation overall, and for university graduates, is even worse in the UK than it is in the US.  And, for various reasons, it may have an even harder time rebounding in Albion than in America.


For one thing, British manufacturing industries are older and therefore have more outmoded technologies than their American counterparts.  So, many British jobs have been outsourced or eliminated outright.  Also, some experts argue that since Margaret Thatcher began her reign as Prime Minister,the country's economy was even more dominated by one sector (financial services) and section of the country (London and the Southeast) than America ever was.  Plus, English society is still, in many ways, bound by class structure (At least the Brits admit as much!) and other bureaucracy that doesn't exist to the same degree in the United States.


Anyone who wonders why there were riots last summer needs only to walk the streets of Tottenham, Brixton, Leicester, Birmingham, Salford and much of Aberdeen, and see the throngs of unemployed young people.  Many have never had jobs; unless things change, some never will, and many more feel they have no hope of getting a job.  Among the jobless and those who have no hope are a number of university graduates.


The situation might be even worse in France.  From the 1980's, French policy-makers repeated one of the biggest mistakes their American counterparts made:  encouraging as many people as possible to go to university.  Even so, France has had one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the industrialized world for at least the past two decades.  To be fair, the situation probably has as much to do with French laws about hiring as it does with a glut of university graduates.  Some experts say that it costs more to hire or fire a worker in France than in any other country.  That cannot be of help to all of those graduates coming into the market every year. 


You might say that England and France are declining, or at least stable, economies.  That may be true; still, they are the sixth- and fifth-largest economies, respectively, in the world.  They're still attractive to all of those who emigrate from the Middle East and North Africa (mainly, from former colonies) in the hope of a better life.  Some, mainly the young, end up as students in the universities and face even worse prospects at graduation than their paler counterparts.


So do members of the "Ant Tribes."  They are China's recent university graduates, who have been having a difficult time finding jobs, even in the recent boom times.  Perhaps even more shocking is that graduates in STEM fields, for which China has become renowned, are having just as difficult a time as graduates in other fields.


And, as I mentioned in a previous post, university graduates in Korea (which has one of the highest rates of university attendance and graduation) are not getting the jobs for which they trained and are staying with their parents.  That, in another "booming" export-driven economy.  


Unless things change, new under- and un-employed graduates won't have the option of going to other places that have shortages of skilled and educated workers:  those countries will either develop their own problems with keeping their graduates home.


At least the British, French, Chinese, Koreans and Japanese don't have non-dischargable student loans to pay  off.