The Education-Jobs Disconnect

The Worst In A Generation

Here's an article that paints a familiar picture. It shows that the relationship between education and employment is a lot more tenuous than assumed by large parts of our society, up to and including the government.

Among tertiary students, one in two said they felt so pessimistic about their prospects that they were considering further study so they could avoid making career decisions.
Their doubts may be justified. Today's graduates are facing the worst job prospects in a quarter of a century - and perhaps even longer, the latest research shows. 

"I wouldn't use the word 'bleak' … but these are the toughest labour market conditions since the early 1990s, that's for sure," says Graduate Careers Australia strategy and policy advisor Bruce Guthrie. 

"The demand for graduates has dropped away."

Ooh, I remember that '92-'93 peak. That was something else. I had experienced the '87-'88 unemployment as a dropout without any qualifications and found that challenging - it took about 8weeks to find any kind of job - and they were relatively benign years for youth unemployment. I spent most of 1993 working at AFTRS, trying to finish my graduation film, and remember being burnt out by September when I finally finished it. As a graduate, it took me until February the following year to find a full time job.

Back in 1993 before the "internets" as GHW Bush derisively called it, you were scouring the newspaper for job ads and applying for things that were remotely related. What was amazing was the utter dearth of jobs. You could go three weeks without seeing a single job in the arts sector. I couldn't get back into the ABC, and there was really nowhere I knew to tug at getting a job. I eventually lucked out and got picked up by a Japanese ad agency in East Sydney, but that was simply blind luck of the sort where a blind squirrel runs into a nut by accident.

When I reflect on the numbers being reported at the time, youth unemployment was hitting 20-something percent as an average across the nation, so having any kind of degree was no guarantee one would find a job. If it's sitting under 1-in-4 since 2010, then kicks up to the same kind of peak (worse, actually), what it's saying is that there is a backlog of graduates who are simply not getting in to the workplace.

It's a little disingenuous talking about this sort of thing as if somehow Gen-Y job seekers are a different category of job seekers to those in the past, and they are to blame for part of this for having silly expectations about their careers. They're most certainly not to blame - it's the entire market place for jobs that's changed significantly as a result of demographics and economic change: Mature economies with slow growth simply don't have the need to take on new graduates; The older workers are still working on; many Baby Boomers are delaying retirement; economic growth is in low single digits, and there simply aren't enough places for new graduates opening up.

"It's a global phenomenon. We're going into a phase where work is precarious," she says. 

"For the first time in history, people who are qualified are struggling to get a foothold ... professionals are now on contracts or doing casual work, whereas becoming a professional of some sort used to mean you'd get a proper job." 

In 2011, 26 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with only 5 per cent in 1976, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In a day and age where universities are asking people to pay huge fees, the same universities are going to come under scrutiny for their graduates who don't get placed, especially if the students are carrying astronomical debt. I don't know how I would advise a young person today about how to go about with their tertiary education or gaining employment. The ease with which you can get an education in, say, media, is in no relationship to just how rare and difficult it is to get a job in the media. Or Graphic Design (the 1980s dream job). Or Marine Biology (the 1970s dream job) before that. It's not surprising that 90% of people who study any given area do not end up working in that area.

The lousy thing about stories like this is that there isn't a political solution for something like this. It's not like some government(s) can put in some policy to make the field more accessible for young graduates. It's something fundamentally structural about our society whereby we have to monetise everything in order to pretend there is real economic growth. In doing so we've monetised education without thinking of the consequences, and one of the unintended consequences is that it is being manifestly demonstrated how there is no real connection between getting a qualification in an area and getting a career in that same area.