I kept Sunny's title from last week and will try to put the topic into a different perspective. I wager that Sunny's take on the topic is much more pleasant to read than mine.
I don't know how many of you read Bloomberg Businessweek, but for those who don't, it's February 7 - February 13, 2011 edition had the following headlines attached to its cover story by Peter Coy entitled "The Kids are Not Allright." "Youth unemployment is the global economies ticking time bomb" and "Youth unemployment is driving unrest in the Middle East and hollowing out societies from Europe to the US." The online version of the article entitled "The Youth Unemployment Bomb" can be accessed by clicking here. In my opinion, the charts on "the jobless young" not included in the online version may be worth paying a few dollars and getting the paper version.
In Europe, the US and even in China, "an economy that can't generate enough jobs to absorb its young people has created a lost generation of the disaffected, unemployed, or underemployed - including growing numbers of recent college graduates for whom the post-crash economy has little to offer." [In the US, the latter are called "boomerang" kids who move back home after college because they can't find work.]
In Egypt, Mubarak coped with the youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollment, and even five years of economic growth weren't enough to keep the heat off him.
Of course, it is widely expected that eventually growth will resume as the after-effects of the 2008 financial crash diminish. This and the retirement of the baby boomers is believed to ease youth unemployment at most, if not all educational levels. Peter Coy put an interesting twist on this belief. "That's cold comfort to the young people who are out of work now. The short term has become distressingly long. Although the recession ended in the summer of 2009, youth unemployment remains near its cyclical peak. ... What keeps the numbers from being even higher is that many teens have simply given up. Some are sitting on couches. Others are in school, which can be a dead end itself. ... What's more, when jobs do come back, employers might choose to reach past today's unemployed, who may appear to be damaged goods, and pick from the next crop of fresh-faced grads."
One consequence of the weak academic job market is that graduate students, in increasing numbers, are delaying their graduation. Delays have often been the norm in certain disciplines, but the pile up of under- and unemployed Ph.D.'s nowadays has meant that new Ph.D.'s are finding far fewer employment opportunities than their supervisors did. Post-doctoral fellowships now often turn into dead ends and underemployed careers without any security and benefits.
The flooded market also means that departments now hire new faculty members for entry-level, tenure-track positions (if available) with the kind of qualifications that would have provided tenure to previous generations. Quite frankly, I doubt that Nobel laureates like Watson and Crick or Hodgkin and Huxley, with their publication records at the time they received the prize, would make the short list of an academic search these days.
In closing I think that whoever defuses the youth under-/unemployment bomb deserves the Nobel prize.
Dieter
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