The Myth of the Undereducated American and the Overeducated Canadian

• In Event: Rethinking Education, Labor, and Subjectivity

Abstract

The global youth unemployment crisis and its potentially destabilizing political consequences have been described as a “ticking time bomb” in the financial press (Coy, 2011). “Generation jobless,” “the new underclass,” “boomerang kids,” “NEETS” (not in employment, education, or training)—these are just some of the names used to describe the 75 million or so unemployed and restless young people between the ages of 15-24 across the globe (ILO, 2013).

Drawing on liberal and neoliberal scholarship (Darling Hammond, 2010; Hanushek, Peterson & Woessman, 2013), material from the financial news and popular press (Blua, 2012; Coy, 2011; Sorenson & Gillis, 2013), labor market data (BLS; ILO, 2013), and various policy reports (Carnevale & Rose, 2011; Shierholz & Edwards, 2011), this paper seeks to examine and challenge contemporary narratives that suggest secondary and post-secondary education is both a primary cause and solution to the youth unemployment crisis in North America.

In the United States, it is argued that sky-high youth unemployment and underemployment is due mainly to undereducation (Carnevale & Rose, 2011; Goldin & Katz, 2008). From this perspective, the U.S. educational system is said to be failing to provide enough highly skilled graduates relative to their demand, and that this is hampering the economic recovery and job growth. In Canada, it is said that the youth unemployment crisis is mainly due to overeducation (Sorenson & Gillis, 2013; Venn, 2013). Here it is suggested that young people are unemployed and precariously employed because they face a job market oversaturated with college and university graduates. What is interesting here is that in both the United States and Canada the solutions offered to the seemingly divergent problems of undereducation and overeducation are remarkably similar. In both cases, it is argued that educational systems need to be dramatically reformed in order to graduate more highly skilled, resilient, flexible, and risk-bearing entrepreneurial workers capable of filling and inventing the employment niches of the future amid expanding global economic uncertainty and competition.

This paper seeks to challenge and demystify these narratives. It proceeds to draw on Marxist analysis of the global financial and employment crisis (Harvey, 2010) and critical education scholarship (Bowles & Gintis, 2011; Edu-Factory, 2009) in order to argue that the youth unemployment crisis is a structural problem related to the globalization of labor, overaccumulation and faltering demand, technological change, and rapidly expanding inequality and social redundancy that education is neither responsible for nor capable of solving. Further, it suggests that education in both the United States and Canada is positioned as a means to produce a risk-bearing entrepreneurial subjectivity that serves to displace these structural instabilities inherent to contemporary global capitalism. This displacement serves to minimize potential political unrest due to soaring tuition rates, debt, austerity, and rapidly narrowing economic horizons for young people. Solutions to the long-term problems of generational employment and social precariousness thus require rethinking the global education-labor nexus via a model of educational flourishing that advances the full range of human capacities and creativities for democratic social transformation of existing systems.

Author

• Alexander James Means, SUNY - Buffalo State