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What is studying?

Juan Bengoetxea in The Courier

In these times of distress, many see education as the miracle antidote that will cure all our ills. Education, they think that health, social mobility and competitiveness. Human capital, they add, is the soul that 'new growth model' called upon to ensure our future prosperity. From their point of view, education is not an expense but an investment. This discourse contrasts sharply with the attitude of many young people, who consider it a scam its long journey through the university. A significant percentage of English graduates said that if I had to choose today, would never go to college. Perhaps the best example of educational nihilism that is in those 750,000 young people aged between 18 and 24 who neither study nor work. Given this lack of incentives, should examine the extent to which Spain is profitable to invest in education.

Point data seem to suggest that investing in human capital is not a bad deal. A better educated more likely to have stable employment and receive higher wages. But if we analyze the data in perspective we see that the business is not as good as it should. The relative wage of English university compared to workers with lower secondary has fallen, according to the OECD, 40% between 1997 and 2004. The bad part is that not only has reduced the profitability of this investment has also increased its risk. Almost half of our college, if they want employment, they must accept jobs below their qualifications. In doing so out of the market to other young people with less education, who sometimes have no choice but to stay home. Arguably, therefore, that Spain is a country that offers little incentive to study.

This disturbing reality explains, in part, by disturbances from the supply side. As you know, one of the great achievements of democracy has been the increase in our level of education. The improvement has become particularly intense in the university, become a social elevator of the popular classes. In this way we have become one of the countries with the largest number of youth with higher education. But the price paid for that bet has been considerable: a high dropout rate and deterioration of basic knowledge in the ESO. Not to mention the disrepute into which we plunged vocational training over the years transformed into a refuge for poor students. Spain and a distribution exhibits education as a glass of champagne too many people without resorting to too many college and a marked deficit of middle-level technicians.

This peculiar human capital supply has come face to face with a demand no less peculiar. Our production structure is skewed towards sectors intensive in low-skilled labor, such as construction or tourism 'sun and beach. " The burden that this structure is compounded by the small size of our companies, which generally lack sufficient critical mass to invest in training their employees. In Spain, unlike what happens in the European context, only 5% of companies more than ten employees. To make matters worse, our entrepreneurs suffer from an obvious gap in knowledge, which limits the optimal use of the capabilities of their subordinates. In fact, paradoxically, English entrepreneurs have on the whole lower level of training than other workers.

can be said, therefore, to invest in education poses a significant risk, since the supply of the education system is not suited to the needs of the economy. Correcting this imbalance requires reforms, which among other things, curtail the current waste of resources. Suffice it to say, by way of example, that only academic failure costs us each year about 3,000 million euros. But do not be misled, the bulk of the reforms needed to address this mismatch must be performed outside the education system. In this sense, it is good that we started to look at the business with better eyes, so that entrepreneurship garment in the new generations. While the 'innovator' of Schumpeter remains a rarity, we can not afford to give direction to the civil aspirations of our brightest young people.