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China youth unemployment hits high as recovery falters
(www.bbc.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Sounds like Chinese graduates are having the same issues as a lot of Western graduates.
Damn that sucks. I hope things improve for them. (and us too)
I don't know. You are starting to see where education level is no longer providing the premium that it used to in the labor economy. So, you have hazardous jobs with a labor rate assuming anyone can do the job and professional jobs where it was assumed that this isn't the case. It turns out that those hazardous jobs need an increase in pay to attract workers, but part of the reason everything is built in China is because of lower than average labor costs.
If you are a new graduate, you may want to wait for a job in your field rather than take a 996 job at a factory.
The workforce needs to shift back toward an apprenticeship/on the job training model for a lot of things, I think (china and globally, really). There’s always a massive delay between demand and college course path/promotion/graduation. And the lag eventually results in graduates going into a saturated market. Plus education not matching actual first jobs leaves people feeling unprepared to take on higher levels, where if it’s a natural progression it doesn’t.
Idk about other countries but in the us this can be seen with the lawyer boom of the 90s and early 00s, and currently with tech saturation.
A person (with some exceptions, like stem) could take some basic community college courses (or just HS, if we streamlined the process) focused on their eventual path and then get the rest of the training as a junior at their job, like what used to happen, but companies want unicorns for no work on their end and certainly no pay, so it’s unlikely to go back to that model any time soon, despite being objectively better for everyone involved.
At least they won't be suffering under the burden of being both unemployed and in tuition debt. It baffles me that Western universities still demand so much money for what has become a basic employment requirement, and even worse that lots of them are more expensive to foreigners.
Because governments don't want to fund it and it is worth it in some programs.
Anglo universities, not "Western" universities. Also, mostly the US as other Anglo places have sane state programmes to fund tuition, e.g. in the UK you only have to pay instalments if you're actually earning money. Systemically such a system is much closer to the e.g. German "all you pay is some administrative fees we'll get our money back from income taxes" type of funding.
Not at all all countries do the "everyone should go to college" thing, either.
Similar issues, but rates are different. ~7% vs ~20% youth unemployment rates are very different stories. Right now my corner of the country is practically begging for workers, we simply doesn't have the warm bodies post-covid to fill the open positions. Anyone with a pulse, 18-80, is welcome to work for a decent wage, degree or no, and still 7% of the youngins are not employed.
I'm not an economist, but to me 7% unemployment is bad, 20% is a crisis waiting to happen.
Yet the unemployment rate was much higher during the last recession, we hit somewhere around 25% overall unemployment rate until they stopped counting workers who simply left the workforce.
Another cultural victory for the west!