Swedish Eco-Tourism Graduate Wonders Why She is Unemployed
She joins expanding ranks of chronically unemployed young Europeans.
File this story under “Worthless College Degrees – International Edition”:
As the first anniversary of her graduation in eco-tourism and cultural history approaches, Linnea Borjars remains jobless and frustrated.
After finishing her studies at Sweden’s Linkoping University, the 25-year-old accepted an unpaid, part-time position at Fair Travel, a non-profit group focused on human rights and tourism, hoping it would lead to a full-time job and a salary.
But no such luck.
When her contract ended in December, she declined the offer to stay on as an unpaid intern. Since then, dozens of applications and endless hours of networking have yielded just two interviews, despite a resume boasting a stellar academic record and a string of hard-to-obtain internships.
“I feel in some ways that I’m of no use anymore. It’s like I’m posing nude in my cover letter, begging for approval, but I just keep on getting dumped,” says Borjars, who lives a few train stops south of where young Swedes rioted last month, in part in an outcry against their miserable job prospects.
Borjars’ situation is a reflection of the depth of the European economic crisis. It is not only unemployment but also underemployment – including workers who are overqualified, interns who are unpaid or low-paid and part-time employees who want full-time work – that has reached critical levels in many EU countries, and could leave a permanent financial and psychological mark on a generation.
The European Union’s unemployment statistics do not account for university graduates who are employed to flip hamburgers, or part-time coffee shop baristas who want to work more hours.
But experts now argue that the number of people who are underemployed has become too great to ignore, and represents a huge loss of potential economic output.
OVERQUALIFIED AND UNDEREMPLOYED
To understand where underemployment fits in, it is worth looking at how the EU’s statistics break down.
Last December, the most recent full figures available, 25 million of the EU’s workforce of 240 million were unemployed and actively looking for jobs, producing an unemployment rate of 11 percent….A fifth of the EU’s workforce is now registered as part-time, up from 16 percent in a decade.
(Hat-tip, Glenn Reynolds)
Insight: Educated with a dead-beat job - the unseen legacy of Europe's crisis (Reuters News Service)
Comments
In the fall of 2011 I happened to be in Seattle and on my way to a concert happened to wander by Occupy Seattle. Having some time, I chatted briefly with a couple of occupiers.
One young woman was quite upset; she couldn’t get a job in her field, or indeed any job, although she had a double major from the U. of Washington. Her majors were women’s studies and peace studies.
I didn’t tell her, “Sister, I wouldn’t hire you either, at least not for a job that required analysis.” With those majors it was unlikely that she’d ever heard or been assigned to read anything that did not follow the department’s orthodoxy and that anyone who offered any such dissenting idea would not have been treated with respect.
For that matter, given the women’s studies major, there’d be a reasonable likelihood that if someone said something she didn’t like or looked at her sharply she would, literally, make a federal case of it.
And she’ll stay underemployed forever.
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