Kristen Gyles | The key to success is now a swipe card

The formal education system is becoming more and more unappealing to many Jamaican youth – not because young people don’t yearn for reaching the upper echelons of academia or because they don’t value information, but because the cost of education has made a lifetime of ignorance more economical than the journey through the education system.

Education, sadly, is no longer seen as the key to success, but rather the key to the downward-spiralling sinkhole of debt. A significant proportion of tertiary students are forced to use borrowed funds to pay for their degrees. For the upcoming school year, the Students’ Loan Bureau is expected to provide over 13,000 students with loans to further their tertiary education. The two main hesitations persons have regarding these loans are high interest rates and unemployment after graduating their programmes.

The cost of the debt needed to finance the average tertiary education programme is a major disincentive for some students leaving high school who want to further their studies. One security guard recently told me very confidently that if he has to borrow $100 to go to university, he doesn’t see why he should pay back $150, and for that reason he has opted out of tertiary education up until now.

The principle of high interest rates is neither the only nor the primary issue though. Even with the best of intentions, many young people take on student loans with the expectation that they will be able to repay their loans once they find employment. The sad reality is that employment, even in some of the most lucrative career fields, may not come until months or even years after. Meanwhile, student loan debts are racking up interest.

NEXT JOB ADVERTISEMENT

I look around me and what I see is numerous ‘educated’ young people in their early 20s sitting around at home looking for the next job advertisement to hijack. Things have become rather dismal for the young educated class in Jamaica, who are paying through their teeth with what they don’t even have.

Times have changed. Young people are consistently reminded by their baby boomer parents that education is the key to success. That key has now morphed into a swipe card. The formula for ‘success’ has always – until now – been very straightforward: 1) Go to school; 2) Get a job; and 3) Save towards retirement. Young people today are now getting stuck at Step 1 and have to be finding new methods of finding ‘success’. Going to school and actually finishing school is a major challenge for most people because it is just too expensive. And when some parents take the courageous step of selling the shirts off their backs in hopes of covering the expensive tuition fees, they are disappointed when their investments pay little to no dividends and instead they find themselves stuck, for an extended period, with an idle young adult milling around the house, opening the fridge every 20 minutes.

This only makes for demotivated and deflated university graduates, especially in cases where they themselves spent their university tenure working to help finance their studies. This is not a reality that many members of the older generation can truly appreciate because their reality was one in which a high-school graduate could find work. I have come across so many baby boomers who have been able to relate stories of how they started working at age 15 or 16. Those days are gone. And without either a competitive tertiary degree or a ‘friend’ in high places, young people are left to take up employment in job hunting for extended periods after finishing their degrees.

UNHEALTHY OBSESSION

Recently, Minister of Education Fayval Williams announced plans to make sixth-form programmes mandatory for all students leaving high school. While I can see that we have developed an unhealthy obsession with making everything we think is good mandatory, I was more intrigued by the rationale given. Seemingly, too many young people, after sitting their CSEC exams in fifth form, leave school and go home to very unconstructive activities.

In other words, youth should be engaged in constructive activities and since the job market is too limited to accommodate them, they may as well just stay in school. School has become the new day care – a new pass-time for idle kids. This is not necessarily a good thing because these will be the same students who will have to be dragged to classes kicking and screaming and will give the poor teachers hell.

What is the real issue here? Joblessness. Not a lack of education. There are numerous degreed and double-degreed persons working in jobs that high school graduates could be taught to do. The job market is simply far too saturated to accommodate the upcoming crop of students. And persons now cope by trying to make themselves more and more competitive by getting more and more degrees that are practically unnecessary for the fulfilment of the jobs they seek. After all, people have to try something.

What should the Government do about oversaturation in the job market? I won’t pretend like I have all the answers, but students are starting to see that with changing times should come changing approaches. Faith in the formal education system is dwindling because it is no longer very meritocratic. But with few income-earning alternatives, what choice do young people really have? After a few turn to YouTube or TikTok and another few start baking pudding to sell for a living, the legal alternatives will eventually appear to have been almost maxed out. So, what do they do?

Kristen Gyles is a graduate student at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. Email feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com.