Two stories here, which may, I’d venture, be connected. The first, from Colm Keena in the Irish Times, last December:
The number of students who went on to third-level education jumped “sharply” in 2020, as the pandemic hit employment and foreign travel opportunities for school leavers, according to a new report.
The percentage of second-level students who went on to higher education was 66.1 per cent in 2020, up from 62.1 per cent the previous year, according to the Education Indicators for Ireland 2021 report, which has just been published.
For Deis schools – schools with a higher proportion of children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds – the percentage of students who progressed to higher education was 46.7 per cent, up from 41.4 per cent in 2019.
The second, from Julianne Corr at the Times of London Irish edition, yesterday:
The challenge of recruiting a sufficient number of bus drivers in Dublin is “an increasing risk” for the implementation of the next phases of BusConnects, the National Transport Authority has said.
The fourth phase of BusConnects, a key part of the government’s policy to improve public transport and address climate change in Dublin and other counties, is scheduled to launch in August. The third phase — the N4 and N6, which now service north Dublin — began operating on May 29. This phase was delayed by five months due to a shortage of bus drivers.
The number of people going on to third level education, at 66%, might not seem extortionately high at first glance, leaving as it does 34% of school leavers to pursue other paths. But consider for a moment that that 34% figure is in the first instance, slightly misleading, and in the second instance, probably insufficient for the needs of a modern economy.
It’s misleading because it includes all sorts of people who will not end up being available for what we might call the semi-skilled sector. It includes people who take a year out before going to college, or people who repeat their leaving cert, or, at the other end of the scale, people who head to juvenile detention or prison.
And it’s insufficient, most likely, because of the sheer breadth of jobs and roles in the semi skilled sector as opposed to the graduate sector. Many of that 34% will head off to do apprenticeships as builders or plumbers or carpenters, some may join the armed forces, some others will emigrate to Australia. When all of that is said, and done, Dublin Bus aren’t left with a massive number of people lining up to take jobs as drivers.
This brings us to Peter Turchin’s famous theory about elite overproduction. Turchin’s theory, basically, is that the explosion in third level education as an industry has led to a situation where there are far too many over-qualified people chasing too few elite-level jobs, meaning that many of them end up disgruntled, and far poorer than their education levels would suggest. At the same time, the lack of semi-skilled labour – or failed elite graduates willing to settle for a job as say, a bus driver – fuels the need for more immigration to fill those roles, which further exacerbates social tensions.
We’d be a happier society with more young people driving busses, and fewer doing accounting degrees, so the theory goes.
The problem with that, of course, is that it’s perfectly fine for somebody like me to say it, with my relatively useless Trinity Education. “Go and drive a bus yourself, then” is a perfectly fair retort.
But, for all that, it’s obvious that we’re seeing the problem made real in the Ireland of 2022. Do we, by any chance, have a big cohort of relatively underpaid graduates in their 20s and 30s who can’t afford a house and have no chance of starting a family and who are very angry about it? I’d say we do. Do we have a shortage of bus drivers, and plumbers, and carpenters, and all the rest of it, causing the Government to look to immigrants to fill those gaps? Again, I’d say we do.
All of it has more than just economic consequences, as Turchin notes. We’re in the business of raising several generations who feel they’re too good to be a bus driver, and therefore would sooner do an unpaid internship somewhere in the vain hope of getting noticed than they would take a 700 quid a week job driving a Dublin Bus. No wonder they’re relatively poorer, and more angry. One reason for the shortage of bus drivers, after all, is that there are families in Ireland where there were generations of Dublin Bus drivers, but where the kids of this generation feel they deserve more than being a Dublin Bus driver.
It might not be a coincidence that the first generation to experience this huge rush to third level education is also the first generation since our independence that will end up, on the current trajectory, much poorer than their own parents. What any Government could do about it in the current climate, though, without being denounced from the heights by all sides, I have no idea.