Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
Canada is one of the few countries in the world where Universities do not co-ordinate with the federal government over how many students they have in each faculty. In Scandinavian countries and Switzerland the government takes active control over how many students are allowed into each and every program. They have virtually no youth unemployment as a result.
|
This is very inaccurate.
Finland has a youth unemployment rate of ~25%.
Sweden has a youth unemployment rate of ~24%.
Norway generally has a low unemployment rate, because it's a rich oil country.
The Danes actually have a pretty good system that the local social democrats came up with in the mid 90's, (sometimes called "
flexicurity", although that term is often poorly used).
At it's core it's about three things
1) Ease of hiring and firing employees
2) High level of unemployment benefits
3) Active policies to promote re-employment (for example, an employee about to lose his/her job gets paid vacation days to search for a new job; but really there's a ton of stuff the state and the soon-to-be-former employer are required to do help the employee get hired somewhere else.)
It's a great system really, and has cut the unemployment in Denmark to really low numbers while giving their economy a nice boost. Unfortunately since it requires high taxation on the high income bracket and good benefits for the unemployed, it's politically impossible in most countries, even though it pretty much gives everyone what they want. (It's even generally beneficial for the people in the high income bracket because they tend to benefit the most from a general economic boost.)
In Finland the ratio of eduction opportunities and actual jobs out there is also pretty badly out of whack. We need to import doctors to fill vacancies, but churn out ridiculous numbers of media workers etc.
My wife studied biochemistry at the university level, and just scored her first real (hopefully) steady job in her field, at the age of 35. Most of her peers have reacted with a "wow, there are actually jobs in this field?" The ratio of chemists/biochemists trained and the jobs in the field is badly distorted, and their student union has for years lobbied for the number of students accepted to be lowered, with no success.