For years we have been telling kids that the way for them to get ahead is to get a good education. We have piled more and more pressure on them, tested them to within an inch of their sanity at school, then packed them off to university, to get into massive debt, all on the pretext that the land of milk and honey they will enter with a good degree will make it all worth it.
Well, surprise surprise, it doesn't work. When an economic downturn hits, the first victims, before any redundancies, are those out looking for new jobs. This year, it is devastatingly obvious that graduate jobs are thin on the ground, leaving an entire year group fighting for fewer jobs, with the added competition of thousands of newly laid-off graduates.
And that's the other problem our young people are facing - many businesses operate a last in, first out principle, throwing newly employed graduates back into the ranks of the unemployed. Of the 137,000 rise in unemployment in the three months to October, 40% were aged 18 to 24.
Jobs are already drying up, leaving many of the class of 2008 without work. And they are only going to get worse for the class of 2009.
But don't worry, Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, has the answer:
"It's going to be a shock to the class of 2009. But it's far better to consider a temporary job than to sit at home and feel sorry for yourself. Why not do bar work? It involves skills you need for lots of jobs - working with people and perhaps negotiating tricky situations."His suggestion that young graduates, leaving university with debts of tens of thousands of pounds, look for bar work is insulting. But it does point to the other group who are being hit - young non-graduates. As graduate jobs dry up, inevitably graduates will start applying for jobs lower down the corporate ladder. They are going to start displacing young people without degrees, who have nowhere else to go.
The government has announced extra funding for apprenticeships, but how many businesses are willing to take this on? How many young people can be covered by this?
The response to the prospect of mass unemployment in new graduates has been patronising, and pointless. As reported in The Guardian, Richard Reeves, director of Demos,
says a government minister recently told him unemployed graduates will probably end up doing master's degrees. "'Let them do master's degrees' is the modern equivalent of 'let them eat cake'," says Reeves. "You just worsen the problem. Doing an MA should not be an economic policy, it should be a broader social policy."Encouraging already highly educated, but heavily indebted, young people to take on more debt for more education seems a bizarre idea. Students who are already doubting the ability of their degree to help them find work are unlikely to see the answer in another degree.
But even this answer is less insulting than the current plan for paid internships. Under this plan, some graduates will be offered 3 months paid internships. Firms including Barclays and Microsoft will take advantage of the scheme. And I really do mean take advantage.
The new graduates will gain experience and work skills - but certainly not a decent wage. They will be paid at a rate which will ensure an income "only slightly higher" than undergraduates' income from grants and loans. Currently, the maximum annual student grant is £2,835 a year, while the maximum annual maintenance loan is worth £6,475. Are we really surprised that large firms are happy to get high quality, cheap labour? But is this all we want to offer our young people? Sweatshop wages after years of university education?
Sadly, it may well be. We can expect little government action over this. They have been aiming for 50% of all young people to go to university for many years now. (Incidentally, something I agree with.) But what they haven't been doing is ensuring there are enough of the kind of knowledge based businesses in the country who want to employ this steadily growing number of graduates. They have been crossing their fingers that the businesses will be there, and they pretty much were - right up until the first sign of a wobble in the economic situation.
A democratically elected government will pursue policies that get them votes. This is both the strength and the weakness of the system. Here, it is a weakness, because, basically, young people don't vote. Demographically, there are more over 60s than under 16s. Electorally, over 55s accounted for 40% of all votes in the last election. In contrast, 18-24 year olds made up 7%.
You may have noticed David Cameron's latest proposal of tax cuts for savers. Ignoring the arguments over whether this is to reward those who behave prudently, or a recipe for economic disaster in recession, we can see that it was targeted at the group that is most likely to have savings - those who have paid off their mortgage, and are settling down to a nice retirement: the grey vote. This is just the first sign of a growing focus by the political parties on those who actually vote - and who can blame them? It's what they are there for.
Over Christmas and New Year, I stayed at my parents' place. One day, my father asked me a simple question: "Is there a political party for young people these days?" Once upon a time, when I was young and optimistic, I'd have said there was, and that it was the Labour Party. Of course, about the same time he probably wouldn't have needed to ask.
But now he has a valid point. More and more, parties will cater to the grey vote, the baby-boomer voting bloc. They will call for tax-breaks on savings, pension increases for all, government bail-outs for private pension schemes. All of these things need to be paid for. And as socialists, we should all be concerned about this. The only place for money that flows to the old to come from is from the young. And this is likely to be a redistribution of wealth from those who have little to those who have more.
So young people have two paths to prosperity. One option is what already seems to be happening, at least in part. The information about graduate internships came out in a Telegraph interview with John Denham. As he said:
"These are the children of the baby-boomers. They will be a very big group; around 300,000. What do we do with them?..We can't just leave people to fend for themselves."I suspect the first sentence tells you why he is interested in helping these graduates - the votes of their parents. It seems young people today can only hope to do well thanks to the indulgence of their parents' generation.
The other path is to organise, campaign, and vote. But too many have the view that political parties are all the same. They join single issue campaigns, targeted little protests that don't effect the big picture, that won't change society. Or they hold the view that they can't change anything on their own, so it just isn't worth trying. Given the numbers, they may even be right.
But as I have already written on my wish to hope again, perhaps I need a more upbeat conclusion. Perhaps this recession is the wake-up call a generation needs. Perhaps finding out the stories they were told by their elders, about keeping their heads down, working hard, getting a degree, getting onto the corporate ladder, perhaps finding out those stories just weren't true might shake some of them from their apathy. Maybe there will be discontent in our universities again. And maybe, just maybe, that will translate into a political force.
(Links: Telegraph interview with John Denham. Nick Cohen on the grey bloc. Graduate jobs crisis in The Times, The Guardian, The Guardian again. Graduate intern plan on BBC News.)
