U.S. Kids Are Doing Better Than You Think

You’ve repeatedly heard the conventional wisdom: When compared with Europeans and Japanese, U.S. young people are undereducated, undermotivated and hopelessly unprepared for the competitive challenges of the next century. America is the “only” advanced industrialized nation with severe social problems, especially those relating to education and the young, worries Laura D’Andrea Tyson, director of Berkeley’s Institute of International Economics.

Truth be told, American youth generally stack up far better than expected when compared to their counterparts elsewhere--many of whom may prove to be as overrated as the “elite” Iraqi Republican Guard--in such critical areas as basic education, useful technical skills and work ethic.

Overall, young Americans still rank as among the best educated in the world. Indeed, despite its many deficiencies, the U.S. education system provides college-level instruction to roughly three-fifths of all Americans between ages 20 and 24. In Japan, France and Germany, such opportunities exist for less than one-third of the youth population; in Great Britain, the percentage is closer to 20%.

Even U.S. education’s admittedly disturbing traits are often cast in misleading, even wrong-headed, ways. For example, some political and media figures suggest that upward of 30% of all high-school students drop out of school. But these calculations often leave out such factors as the number of students who repeat a grade, either due to illness or academic problems, and the number who drop out but eventually return to graduate. More recent U.S. Department of Education studies indicate that the dropout rate is probably well under 13%, although still as high as one-third among Latinos.

Equally misleading are the frequently cited test-score comparisons between American and foreign students. These studies, particularly in Europe, are often based on student samples that are a fraction--typically the relatively small group “tracked” for higher education--of the size of ours. Also contributing to the distortion is the overlooked fact that when most European young people are finishing their education, many Americans are just beginning their experience with quality education. In Japan, college often represents little more than a rather care-free, four-year vacation after an extraordinarily rigorous, if stifling, secondary education.

The assumed inferiority of U.S. students feeds another familiar bias: America has a virtual monopoly on the youth “underclass” of unemployables. Yet throughout Europe, youth unemployment rates are, on average, higher than in the United States, reaching as high as 20% in Ireland and Spain. In British cities, particularly in old industrial centers like Leeds or Sheffield, it is not uncommon to see British youth, some dressed in rags, wandering aimlessly. Close to half of all young Britons are out of school by age 17, three times the percentage for African-Americans in the United States; more than one-third have difficulty spelling basic words.

The situation on the Continent is not much better. In the high schools of Paris’ grimy suburbs, persistent overcrowding and substandard conditions drove 100,000 students into the streets last fall. But perhaps more menacing is the situation in newly liberated eastern Germany, where a class of unemployed, and likely unemployable, youths is emerging. “People are very dissatisfied and feel they have no prospects. And they haven’t hit bottom yet,” says Frank Stille, a researcher at the DIW research institute in Berlin.

Exacerbating Europe’s youth problems are rising numbers of new immigrants, mostly from the Islamic countries of the Near East and North Africa. A recent U.N. International Labor Organization report referred to the estimated 7 million children--roughly one-tenth of the youth population of Western Europe--as a “demographic time bomb.”

These youngsters have virtually no hope of rising to even the middle rungs of the highly structured European education system. In the western part of Berlin, for example, Turks account for roughly one in five young people; yet only 7% ever attend gymnasium, the secondary-education level required for university admission. Barely 3% ever enter university.

In France, admission to university-level education for the large Algerian Muslim population is rare indeed; the rector of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, one of France’s elite technical institutions, could not recall one Algerian-French student attending his institution in recent years.

It may well be in areas where they are most faulted--technical proficiency and work ethic--that American youth may be best positioned against their much-heralded rivals. By comparison with our major rivals, America’s projected shortfall of 560,000 engineers by the year 2010 seems almost insignificant. For one thing, new immigration quotas, up to 140,000 annually, for such needed technical talent could do much to narrow the shortfall. Already, roughly one-quarter of all new immigrants possess professional or technical backgrounds, compared with only 15% of the overall population.

None of our major foreign competitors, by contrast, are likely to tolerate, much less encourage, large-scale movements of skilled workers; most are attempting to slam the gates shut. For Japan, the consequences may be especially acute. By 1993, the Keidanren estimates that Japan will be short at least 200,000 technicians in the field of basic research, application and development; early in the next century, projected shortages of software engineers could approach a million.

These trends are accelerating because of the slow growth of the Japanese work force--now roughly half that in the United States--and the increasing disaffection of young workers--known in Japan as shinjinrui or “the new race”--toward industrial work or technical jobs. A recent poll of career preference among college juniors, taken last year, showed trade, media, banking, hotels and travel to be favorites, with industry, including high-tech, far down the list.

These attitudinal changes have even seeped into the ranks of those trained to lead Dai Nippon’s much-hyped surge to technology hegemony. Since 1960, the percentage of engineers choosing to work for industrial firms has dropped from 66% to barely 50%; among science graduates, it has dropped from 50% to less than 33%. Nor does it get better at the top of the generational pyramid. Last year, roughly half the graduating class in computer science at the elite Tokyo University took jobs with finance, real estate and other non-manufacturing pursuits.

A similar problem plagues many Western European countries. In 1990, Italy, France and Belgium barely produced half the number of engineers needed to meet industrial needs. Germany, even after absorbing East Germany, faces equally daunting problems, with the number of enrollees in its widely admired apprenticeship program steadily dropping since 1988, from 1.8 million to 1.5 million. Today, new-job offers for apprentices stand at twice the number available.

Germany is already experiencing a severe shortfall of 30,000 engineers in such fields as construction, development, planning sales and marketing. Meanwhile, the number of eligible university students has been slipping, with a nearly 25% downturn forecast in former West Germany between 1988 and 1995. By the year 2010, according to government estimates, the country will be short at least 500,000 college graduates.

Perhaps even worse, the current pool of young Germans seems unlikely to devote themselves feverishly enough to forge the massive productivity jump that would allow their nation to overcome its growing deficit in brainpower. A 1990 survey of European college students, conducted for France’s second largest industrial group, found Germans second only to Scandinavians as the least ambitious and motivated of all young Europeans. The study also revealed that only 3% of German college students indicated any interest in manufacturing, research or development.

“The Prussian mentality has broken down--people are not so concerned with a good salary or doing a good job as they are with leisure or having vacations,” says Hans Steskal, a partner with the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse in Munich. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. My generation and the one behind me had to work very hard and build up Germany; but now, when you do a recruitment interview, all they want to talk about is retirement payments and vacation--and this at age 25!”

The Japanese are not immune to such attitudes. Today’s young Japanese may already be less work-oriented and more self-oriented than their counterparts in other countries, including the much-maligned youth in the United States, according to a survey conducted by the Dentsu Institute for Human Studies in Tokyo.

Dentsu asked young people in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo about the importance of work as “the purpose for living.” In response, only 51% of young Tokyoites named work, compared with 57% of New Yorkers and 61% of Angelenos. The attitudes of the youngest Japanese surveyed--the so-called “post-baby boomers”--were particularly jaded: 23% placed priority on hard work, far less than their counterparts in America.

None of this means that we should stop efforts to improve our current generation of young people, particularly in the minority communities. But it is time to stop mindlessly mimicking the alarms of a rising tide of imbecility, and start treating U.S. youth as perhaps our last best hope for maintaining America’s industrial pre-eminence in the decade to come.

Research assistance was provided by Mari Arizumi, in Los Angeles, and Dirk Grosse-Leege, in Germany.