Here's the chart that the BBC published recently: 
The fall between 1993 and 2000 looks very dramatic, as is the fact that youth unemployment has doubled again since then.
I can't find a similarly handy chart for students, but statistics for each year since 1994-95 are available here. I used the figure for full-time undergraduate HE students and we can tack on the figures for 1992 to 1994 from Figure 2.1 here. We can then chuck both sets of figures on one chart to see the total number of young people not in work (whether 'unemployed' or 'full time student'). Is the suspicion that UK governments tried to get as many young people as possible into university in order to mask rising youth unemployment justified?
As ever, it's make up your own mind* time (click to enlarge):
* The question is, do we go with the official version that youth unemployment fell by 400,000 between 1993 and 2000 and then rose by 500,000 by 2010, or did it in fact only fall by 200,000 between 1993 and 2000 and then rise by 600,000?
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16 comments:
Whatever way you look at it, it was trending downwards until about 2000 when the Snot Gobblers great money expansion and tax n spend got going.
can you subtract students from the unemployed in that chart and show the difference?
L, yes, that's how I see it (rightly or wrongly).
JT, the top chart (yellow area) is just unemployed (excl. students). The bottom chart (red area) is students and the blue area (unemployed) is added on top. So the blue area is in theory the same shape as the yellow area only the bottom edge slopes upwards.
I should print that chart out and stick it in the rear window of my car...
Surely the charts just mirror the numbers of people born between 1966 and 1987. The only thing that they really tell me about youth unemployment is that the various government solutions of the last 30 years have been broadly ineffective. Or am I missing the point?
Also, ya know, the National Minimum Wage was introduced in 1999. There's that.
D, number of births per year over past fifty years was surprisingly stable as was the number of young people see e.g. here so I doubt it's that.
But like I said, everybody can make up their own mind and will have their own explanations/suggestions etc.
RS, the NMW won't have helped.
That's a bit worrying then. If demographics aren't to blame then it suggests that things are definitely getting worse.
Seems to mirror the business cycle pretty well. Worse this time.
What astonishes me is the youth are not going bananas about it all.
Even the Occupy Movement elites are not going that radical. Most of the inside elite are future 1%'ers in training. Thats not to discount the motives of the core of the movement at all. Just to point out that power tends to corrupt anywhere in this universe.
To me, it looks like another example of the older generation benefitting at the expense of the younger. As Lola says, things started going downhill from 2000 onwards, but debt-funded spending tended to mask the recession at first. As the jobs market shrank, it was the older, more skilled people who were hired in preference to the younger, less skilled. Who wants to train someone, when there's someone already trained out of work?
There is work out there for young people to do - it's the sheer red tape of employing someone, combined with the impossibility of going to work for low wages or a short period if you are on the dole that means that they can't do it.
A higher education bubble in my opinion. The ridiculous Labour concept that increasing the number of graduates would lead to an increase in the number of graduate level jobs (and hence better wages for those participating) is being exposed. In fact it mirrors the housing bubble policy that dupes people into thinking that everyone becomes more wealthy with increasing house prices.
D, even if there had been a rapid increase in the number of births/young people, that's surely no reason to assume that they'd all be unemployed?
RS, yup, to paraphrase Winston Smith "If there is hope, it lies with the young". So we're doomed, basically.
B, yes, there is a large element of that. Why would older people go to all the hassle of starting and expanding businesses if their houses are printing money for them?
QP, can you expand on that?
I think it is quite possible that up until 2000 or so, increases in full time students served to quite successfully mask the fact that youth unemployment was not falling as fast as we'd like, but once the first waves of surplus students started coming through the system, it just made things worse, so higher student numbers now exacerbates youth unemployment.
But maybe that is not what you meant.
I was a Yoot during the last recession. I remember thinking, oh well lets have another beer.
Youth + middle class = hope
But where democracy puts power in the hands of the very wealthy or the very poor, that will wreak havoc. The Matrix of Homeownerism.
The middle class are gradually being swept away too. Most of them clinging on to homeownerism as they go down into poverty.
Ive spoken to many of these at St Pauls who basically come along to confess their sin of homeownerism. Realising its all too late now. Just needing someone to tell about it. You just listen. Lawyers, dentist, entrepreneurs, teachers, artisans and so on. Living in hostels, their cars, on the street.
That's the main of it. The time lag can be more than the standard three year course though if you include further education (kids that would in the past worked from 16 now staying in education) and post-graduate degrees. I should try to dig out some numbers but I'm certain that the numbers of young people doing post-grad degrees has increased substantially. Anecdotally I know a number who went quickly on to further study when they saw a tough job market with perceived "qualification inflation". Coupled to the bubble of student numbers you also have an increase in the number of employed staff to look after them. Significant job losses now with the cuts to higher education budgets. I reckon that in many cases the people who have done best from the "higher education bubble" are the rentiers profiting from letting and capital gain speculation in University towns. And we are thus back on familiar territory.
[E]ven if there had been a rapid increase in the number of births/young people, that's surely no reason to assume that they'd all be unemployed?
Do you favour the former or latter take then?
Qp, you don't need to dig too far on post-grad students, I took the figures for full time undergrad students from the link given, they also give figures for post-grad students. But there are no 'significant cuts' to HE budgets either, that's just government/trade union spin.
JH, there wasn't any increase in the number of births anyway. And even if there had been, that's no reason to assume higher unemployment - that's like saying that unemployment is proportional to population size or something equally daft.
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