Turkish Youth (un)Employment

Author: Emre Deliveli  ·  November 18th, 2011  ·  963http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economonitor.com%2Femredeliveli%2F2011%2F11%2F18%2Fturkish-youth-unemployment%2FTurkish+Youth+%28un%29Employment2011-11-18+21%3A26%3A15Emre+Delivelihttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.economonitor.com%2Femredeliveli%2F%3Fp%3D963 › Share This Print

I am continuing with yesterday’s shameless self-advertising, but this time it is in English: You can find my comments in the article The New Young Turks: Over-Educated, Tech-Savvy, and Jobless by Justin Vela. I would like to make some clarifications to some of the points raised in the article.

I would put the main problems preventing youth from being employed (other than demographics) into two main categories:

First, there are the regulatory problems such as high severance pay and difficulty of temp./part-time employment. It is true that these hurt all workers looking for work, but they tend to hurt young university graduates trying to enter the work force for the first time more. Then, there is the overall quality of university graduates. Here, I commented to Justin on the (lack of) business-university relationships and the inability of most universities to give their students the basic skills required by businesses, but there is even a more major problem- the general quality of the students. Just look at the two comments below the article and you’ll see what I mean. Eren Ocakverdi of Yapi Kredi Research expands upon this point to criticize the article:

“Unfortunately, over-education stems from the duration and therefore does not represent the quality or content of the curriculum. It is true that we have many graduates today than we had 15-20 years ago. I think this article misses the most fundamental and relevant issues, since it focuses mainly on the structural and regulatory problems in the labor market. However, as you know, tertiary education is much more than that. Supply and demand mismatch here is beyond the simple context of quantity, needless to say. So, maybe we should start discussing educational reform along with constitutional reform. Turkey’s performance on PISA scores might give you a better idea (and hint) on where to start.”

Eren’s point on the PISA scores, if I didn’t misunderstand him, is that the problem goes much beyond universities: The students already have no skills when they enter universities, and that it is difficult for the universities to mend things at that point. This is a point I am well aware of, as it was brought up many many times during my World Bank consulting work on higher education-business relationships. However, it doesn’t change the fact that almost all institutions of higher education are doing a lousy job in making their students hirable. There are great anecdotes in the World Bank report if you are interested.

Of course, then the billion-dollar question is why? Sometimes, it is lack of adequate staff, equipment and resources. But more often than not, it is lack of incentives, as all universities aspire to be top research universities. Anyway, I am digressing too much; I would urge the interested reader to go through the World Bank report. It is a bit outdated now, but the ideas still work.

Changing gears, @burak_tekes had made an interesting point over at Twitter:

One interesting thing abt TR unemp stats is that the share of long-term unemp (36+ mo) has come down significantly since 05. & short-term (1-12mos) gone up hence a more vibrant job mkt. Maybe the situation is not as bad it’s portrayed in the article.

Sorry for the short-hand Twitter-speak, but I never ever edit quotes… Anyway, Burak was kind enough to send me this info. as a chart, which I have updated for him:

The numbers are just shares in total- I was too lazy to convert it to percentages… Anyway, the picture is not as stark if you group duration as less and more than one year, but Burak’s point is still valid:

But I would still be careful from jumping to conclusions on what this trend means. It could as well be a discouraged worker effect, or God-knows-what… BTW, I am not sure how Eren’s point on overeducation and duration fits into this picture, but I will let him explain that for me when  he sees this post…