The unemployment rate for urban youth has been climbing for several months. This is due to factors including a mismatch between what graduates were trained to do and the jobs currently available.
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.
I remember Spain having traditionally a very high youth unemployment rate, just checked https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/youth-unemployment-rate and it's 28%. Also I remember Swedish youth always struggled and there it's similar to China with 19%.
I guess what is different is that this is new to China. Now you can't get a job when you're young and when you're 35 you're too old to work.
Just in case anyone else was wondering, the unemployment rate for youth (up to 24 years old) in China is 21%.
That's really interesting, I hope they can bring those numbers to a better place. Youth unemployment can cause lots of social unrest, especially when there is no plan/policy in place to address it.
You want to look at seasonally adjusted numbers because it's no wonder that there's massive unemployment the month people get out of school.
Spain and Greece are fucked, yes, structural issues, Italy somehow managed to get back on track. Without seasonal adjustment, during Corona, it was as bad as 70-80% in Greece IIRC.
Three things though that help us soak that kind of thing up: a) mobility between EU countries, b) actual welfare systems, c) not having to pay alimony to your parents, at least not if you're not filthily rich.
Aren't they doing this "let it rot" thing or whatever?
Lying flat?
That was the old name. I think it's progressed to a more complex form. I don't really know though, I think you'd need to ask a Chinese young person, and they have their own internet so that's not necessarily easy.
What's "let it rot" if you don't mind me asking?
It's Chinese youth basically giving up on the prospect of the careers they were planning for , sometimes just staying with their parents and giving up on the job search. I think it comes from caving to too much family/societal pressure and instead adopting a "fuck this" attitude. The Chinese term is Bai lan (摆烂)
See also "tang ping" (lying flat, 躺平)
The media environment in China is murky at best so I'm honestly not sure how much of it is a real phenomenon and how much is propaganda of some sort.
*edited a typo
I only know about it from bits and pieces here and there, but it's a large soft-style protest where they refuse to participate in the economy as much as possible. When they get a job, they do it as poorly as possible without getting in trouble. If they can not have a job somehow, then they don't get one.
According to google, the Chinese words are pronounced Bai Lan in English.
Oh wow! So the same inequality is likely gripping China is what I'm gleaning from this.
I believe the youth in many places of the world are turning against the paradigms of their elders. Just wanna have a nice place to live, man. Don't care about Taiwan or Chinese Pride or trillions of dollars or mighty armies or covid lockdowns, just want a house, job and maybe family, and be able to think that's a safe thing to try and do. Some people are making that harder than it needs to be though, not in just any one place, but lots of places. And it's clearly because they're following old patterns that no longer work as well as they used to.
So take a page from Ghandi. Sit there and wait. They can't vote or anything in any way that matters, they can't rebel against a massively powerful authoritarian state, they'd just die or be tortured into re-education. This soft protest is a viable strategy though, similar things have worked before in history.
We at least can vote and bitch and moan about our leadership without being abducted in the middle of the night, taken away and "re-educated". But even with that democratic alternative, we had our own "Great Resignation", or so we called it.
Well at least we're all going down together?
Buh bu but muh 800 million lifted out of "extreme poverty".
Youth unemployment of over 20%, let's hope they can improve those numbers, that's pretty grim.
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