Forever young: schooling incentives

When youth unemployment peaked in the EU in 2013, we counted about 5.5 million unemployed under the age of 25. For many years since the eruption of the global financial crisis, one in five young Europeans looking for a job could not find any. Many young people experienced long-term unemployment, and the number of 15-29 year olds neither in employment, education or training (NEETs) was nearly 14 million for several years. Since then, a mild and uneven economic recovery has helped to reduce youth unemployment in the EU by about 1.5 million, to around 4 million. But even if it had been “just” 4 million at the peak, it would have been enough for demanding an EU-level initiative. This paper looks back to the creation of the Youth Guarantee, highlighting some key aspects of the debates at the time the initiative was developed, and address some common concerns and misconceptions around it. This reflection should help those who work on the implementation of the Youth Guarantee across the EU, as well as participants of related discussions and students of the European Employment Strategy.

2014

Information................................ / 53 Where is the sup port when you needit? Kids and fam i lies (well, maybe mostly par ents) think about that a lot, I bet – where is the sup port when you need it? I don’t know how many times I have heard par ents say that to me – es pe cially after things have been going well and then, sud denly, they need help or sup-port. “It al ways sounded like there was lots of sup port ‘out there ’ for us as a fam ily,” one mother said. “Until I re ally needed it and then it seemed to have dis ap-peared.”

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2000

Anthropological Quarterly, 2008

2009

Postgraduate Study in South Africa- Surviving and Succeeding, 2016

Comparative Education

In the following article, we share our findings from the comparative analyses of 54 lifelong learning policy measures implemented in nine European countries, with a particular focus on their orientations, objectives, and solutions devised. Informed by the theoretical framework of Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA), we have further reasoned on the impacts and unintended effects on young adults' life course transitions, especially those in vulnerable positions, as well as on the hidden ambivalences and incompatibilities in the objectives and orientations of lifelong learning policies. The article provides, first, a brief discussion of the conceptual and methodological choices made. Second, it gives an overview of the design and data basis of our research. In the third section, we present and discuss the central findings from our interpretive analyses, and we finally conclude with a discussion on current trends in lifelong learning policymaking and on their impact on young adults' transitions.

This research report focuses on Life Patterns Cohort 1 participants who left secondary school in 1991 and amidst deep social, labour and economic restructuring of Australian society. These rapid social changes signify the rupture of traditional youth pathways into adulthood. Amidst this backdrop, we draw on existing quantitative and qualitative data from the longitudinal Life Patterns Project to analyse the educational, employment and personal factors which generate the need to upskill or re-train over the life course. Our aim is to examine why some participants, despite already having a post-secondary school qualification, re-engaged in education and training and thus become lifelong learners. While previous Life Patterns research (Dwyer & Wyn 2001; Dwyer et al. 2003) analyses in the 1990s revealed, for example, the non-linear educational pathways taken by Cohort 1 participants, their “bruising” encounter with a more flexible and precarious labour market than their parents’ generation, and an increasing policy rhetoric of the need for self-capitalisation and individual responsibility to manage structural risks; this report focuses on new longitudinal analysis of the lifelong learning choices of this cohort ten years after leaving secondary school (year 2002) and until their mid-forties (year 2017).

2005

Although educational programs for midlife and older learners may seem unrelated to social ideologies about aging, work, retirement, and the economy, nothing could be further from the truth. Following the older learner’s path through a 70-year journey starting in the 1950s and ending in a projected year 2020 reveals correlations between theories of aging, rationales for older learner programs, and changes in public policy regarding retirement, social and health care insurance, and other age-based entitle-ment programs and social policies (mainly in North America but also with reference to other countries). If, as is asserted here, we are on the verge of an age-irrelevant so-ciety, then these lifelong learning programs hover on the brink of a crisis that may or may not be averted.