Page 69 - Education for Development:George Psacharopoulos University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Education for Development: What Policies?c5

failed.

Many countries share dismal statistics on youth and unemployment,
exceeding 20% in some Mediterranean countries. But is education policy to
blame for Greece’s 43% youth unemployment rate or something else, such as

the economic crisis the country has been going through for a decade?
The earliest attempt to tune the education system to the labor market was
the forecasting of manpower requirements. Based again on intuition, there have

been efforts to predict what would be the labor market needs in the future so
that the school system provide the “required manpower”. In the early 1960’s,
many countries assisted by the ILO, the World Bank and the OECD attempted
to forecast the number of “qualified” or “high-level manpower”, as it was called

at the time, namely the necessary amount of scientists, engineers and the like
needed to produce a unit of output in the various sectors of the economy (Parnes,

1962; OECD, 1965). In the early 1970s many of the forecasts became mature.
An evaluation of the accuracy of manpower forecasts has shown forecasting
errors of thousands percent, even for occupations such as teachers (Ahamad and
Blaug, 1973).

Social inequities

One noble goal of the educational system is to improve social mobility
and reduce social inequities. Although the supply of education has increased

considerably over the years, inequality indices have increased instead of been
reduced (Piketty, 2015).

Why policies fail?

The short answer to this question, is because education policies typically