Even time-honoured traditions like scouring the wanted ads are outdated for today’s struggling youth.

A generation ago, a university degree virtually guaranteed a job. This does not hold true today.

For many recent graduates a university degree is nothing more than a very expensive piece of paper. The unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 24 is close to 15 per cent — double the rate of the general population. When university grads actually do find a job, they often find themselves working in areas unrelated to their field of study or in positions they are overqualified for.

The CBC documentary Generation Jobless, which aired Jan. 31, examines why university graduates are having trouble finding employment. One theory centres on the organization — or lack thereof –— of the education system. Canada is an outlier for not having a national body for post-secondary education. This leads to the Canadian education system lacking a national focus and overall goal. This also causes the university system to be very fragmented and leads to dissociation among individual universities.

This is one of the reasons why transferring between universities within Canada causes so much trouble for many students. Compare this with the Erasmus Programme in Europe that allows students to easily move through many different countries and institutions while studying, and it becomes clear that the Canadian system lacks a cohesive strategy.

This piecemeal approach to education extends to the void between university and the working world. Increasingly, students are finding themselves unprepared to meet the demands of employers. While there are numerous jobs available in one field, there are extreme shortages in others.

One area in which there is an over-abundance of new graduates and a shortage of job openings is education. Every year in Ontario there are over 11,000 new teachers but only 4,600 teachers retire. This trend persists across the country. However, universities keep pumping out graduates and over-enrolling in fields that do not have enough openings for the number of students who will graduate with those qualifications.

Why are universities letting in more students than there are jobs available? The result of this policy is students graduating with large amounts of debt and no foreseeable steady job on the horizon.

There needs to be more communication between professional disciplines, universities and the general population so students are aware of the realities of their chosen fields. Although dim job prospects should not stop students from following their passions, it is important that they are able to make informed decisions when choosing what to study.

The delay between education and career has led media to call our age group the “lost generation” — a generation that is over-educated but underemployed. Young people face many challenges, including the ever-changing workplace, but there is no evidence these challenges are insurmountable. Resourcefulness and adaptability are necessary to find new solutions, and by having to find success with less than ideal conditions, our generation will develop these skills.

Yes, the workplace is shifting, and jobs may not look like they did 20 years ago, but the world doesn’t look like it did 20 years ago, either. Things change and people adapt. This generation may take time to find its footing because of the changing relationship between education and career. But we are preparing an example for generations to come.

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Photo: Joshuaseye/Flickr