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While many around the world are supported by paycheck protection programs or study grants, that safety net is temporary, and there’s no wave of new jobs on the horizon. Most of the companies doing the best right now — large tech companies — don’t employ many people relative to their turnover. “The ‘corona class of 2020’ could face years of reduced pay and limited job prospects, long after the current economic storm has passed,” said Kathleen Henehan, of the Resolution Foundation, a London-based think tank that reports on living standards.
Young people themselves agree with this gloomy outlook. University of Pennsylvania Professor Mark A. Brennan gave Nightly a preview of a new U.N.-backed global survey he co-authored of young people’s attitudes during the pandemic. Those between the ages of 23 and 35 describe “catastrophic” levels of concern for their future, a feeling that is consistent across geographic locations and genders. Brennan pinpoints the issue as the “intersection of disruptions to their education, family and financial well-being.”
America’s education-industrial complex is unique. The college system will leave many with six-figure debts while teaching them on Zoom (and keeping them from experiences and networks that could make the debt worthwhile). Stacked with tenured staff (the average salary of a U.S.-based professor is $104,820), many colleges don’t know how to operate outside the high-fee, high cost-overhead model. It is students who are paying the price.
European students face different challenges that may amount to the same lost generation. Instead of being overcharged, many European youth get underserved on quality, via mediocre teaching in mediocre facilities, with little in the way of customized digital support. Germany’s famously rigorous vocational training path is an exception rather than the rule.
Young European workers in countries like Italy, Spain and Greece — who were largely shut out of permanent contracts with generous benefits before the pandemic — now face situations like Alessandro Margiotta, a young Italian, who told POLITICO he lost a six-month contract due to Covid-19 shut-downs, before turning to a one-week contract and then unemployment benefits.
Such fragile employment makes home ownership a mirage for a generation of Europeans who lack parental assistance, which is at the heart of the long-term problems caused by Covid-19. Most young people in rich countries will now face a difficult path to accumulating wealth based on hard work, a problem already familiar to Black families and other disadvantaged groups in the U.S. Down the road, the political impact of a large class of disaffected youth could be profound — and unexpected. Just ask the countries rocked by the Arab Spring.
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