Young people not studying or working: there was an improvement among the middle classes in the pandemic

“The good news for young people between 18 and 24 years old is that, in the context of the pandemic, a component – those who have lost their jobs, are unemployed or have reduced working hours – continued studies or started tertiary studiesand recovery after a pandemic retained most of that improvement. This process followed an opposite trend among young people from weak sector, where lack of education has led to some of them quit school”.

So he explained to Clarion this “duality” or “increased inequality” the director of the Social Observatory of UCA (Argentine Catholic University), Augustine Salviaabout the situation of “Young people between 18 and 24 years old who are not studying or working in urban Argentina pre-post pandemic (2017-2021) ”.

For the youth of weak sector, “Now there are scholarship policy measures that encourage going back to school. But young people who are not studying or working are grouped together as a quarter of this populationmore than 1.2 million, most are from poor sectors informally, but also from the families of more or less integrated workers. Both categories focus on more than 900 thousand young people, more than 60% women.

The Report states that:

• Although the pandemic has resulted in a slight improvement in the education of young people, by the end of 2021 Only 48.3% of them are studying or have completed their education college or university. So the excluded from the education system represents more than 5 in 10 young people at the national level.

• A large percentage of young people do not go to school and do not work higher in the worker strata aggregate and marginal workers with respect to medium professional and medium non-professional strata.

• The general situation does not seem to have changed much with the pandemic, except in a relative aggravation of such an exclusion situation in adolescents from the marginal strata. In this segment, more than 4 in 10 adolescents experience this double exclusion (45.5%).

• The majors improvements in the period that occurred between young people from middle-class homes professionals, where the exclusion rate dropped from 8.9% to 2.4%.

• The percentage of women who are not studying, working for pay, or looking for work, even with a relative reduction after the pandemic, structurally duplicate their male counterparts (20% vs. 10%, respectively, in 2021).

• Despite its declining post-pandemic proportion due to job search, around 2 in 10 young people from households in the marginal working stratum are not studying or working nor are they looking for work in 2021.

“This sector receives social programs, but not the Progresar scholarshipsThey also have no incentive or opportunity to work or study. For them, it will be important to have not only training programs, but also public or community care services that make possible their participation in the labor market and, above all, in a wider job training system, ”Salvia said.

NE