Breathe
By Nurit Martínez
On the street corners of Mexico City it is common to see that those who clean windshields, juggle, dress as mimes or ask for help for a taco are mostly young people who for some reason do not have a job or are not in school; we stop calling them "ninis" (neither studying nor working) to avoid stigmatizing them, but the real data show that the principle of the poor first did not create better opportunities for those who have less and less to open hope for a better future.
The Mexican State has not been able to ensure that, at least after 12 years of basic education, young Mexicans have the hope of a Mexico of opportunities.
If a young person manages to overcome the adversities of his or her context and finish high school, his or her certificate does not provide opportunities for employment or social development. The most they aspire to is to have a job in the informal sector or an occupation without pay or retroactive pay.
The demands of the labor market have increased in the last decade the need for personnel with higher aptitudinal qualifications, due to the development of technology and the competition of the same market. Even the schools in the neighborhood, neighborhood or municipality offer careers of up to three years from which thousands of young people graduate with no guarantee that they have acquired the minimum skills for employment, to apply for a job.
All of them run into the real world because they actually have a background of what specialists call functional illiteracy in their professions. They have degrees or titles that are useless for the real world, hence today they are incorporated into the informal employment of families, app drivers, delivery drivers and other forms of subsistence in the informal world. That does the world's 15th largest economy no good at all. But the worst thing is that the public policy does not notice it, in these years the focus was only to make them no longer qualified and there was no more.
The most recent diagnoses in the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) point to the fact that the opportunities for young Mexicans to have greater educational opportunities is not only a failure. That is the least of it, what is behind it is the condemnation that thousands of lives, in the fullness of their capacities, have not reached the abilities to contribute to their economy and in the long term to the country's economy in order to project a better future.
The slogan, the campaign promise of Primero los Pobres (First the Poor) in terms of Higher Education is not only a red number, it is, according to what countries in Latin America have achieved, a failed policy given that while in Mexico the average number of young people who finished high school and sought to enter a university career and achieved it was only 42 out of every 100, the average in Latin American countries was 46 out of every 100.
If the comparison is with countries with which the Mexican economy competes, those that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the disadvantage increases: 42 Mexicans against 57 of those nations of the organization. That is a difference of 15 young people rejected.
Some people underestimate this, but let's see that within the country inequalities are increasing. The policy of First the Poor did not deploy its best actions to ensure that the disadvantaged were not even more damaged than they already were by the neoliberal measures of restricting access to certain careers in the country's public universities, or, to put it crudely: that those rejected from public universities did not increase.
Five years after unclear policies, inequality of opportunity has grown. The difference between young people from the poorest states such as Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero is 20 to 24 percent less than the national average, which is 42 young people out of ten. This is due to lack of spaces, ability to pass entrance exams and other economic, family and personal reasons.
The challenge is enormous; the poorest young people continue to lack opportunities. Public policy in the field of education does not have the scope to, in principle, have schemes for revaluing the long-term benefits of continuing to study. How to communicate this to the families, to the young people themselves.
At that age, when they reach 18, immediate needs are canceling the future of all of them. What do we do with young people, is the question in which public policy has been immersed for two decades now, when Mexico was still discussing what to do with the demographic bonus we had left. Today this seems to be a lost opportunity, just as it happened to us when we said we would manage the oil abundance of the 70s of the last century.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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