Innovative Secondary Education For Skills Enhancement

Introduction: The Global Employment Picture
By 2030 the global labor force will be 3.5 billion, an increase
of 600 million from today. Sixty percent of this net
increase will be in South Asia and Africa. Unless secondary
education trends double or triple, one billion of the 3.5
billion will lack secondary education, one-third in India
and another quarter in Africa and the rest of South Asia.
A recent overview suggests that the 2030 global workforce
will contain a potential surplus of 90 to 95 million
low-skilled workers, 58 million of them in developing
countries. By contrast, there will likely be a shortage of 45
million medium-skilled workers in developing countries,
as industrialization raises demand but secondary education
does not keep pace (McKinsey, June 2012).
These long-term trends assume slower job growth in the
past than in recent years, and come on top of a serious
current youth unemployment situation. Everywhere,
youth unemployment is higher than overall unemployment,
and because youth make up such a large proportion
of the population and labor force, the numbers of
unemployed youth often exceed those of adults. In South
Asia, for example, youth unemployment rates are three
to four times as high as adult rates (Srivastava and Khare
2012). Globally, youth unemployment in 2012 is about 75
million, or a rate of 12.7 percent, varying from 28 percent
in the Middle East to 13.5 percent in South Asia. Skills
mismatches are one important cause of unemployment in
general—and of youth unemployment in particular. They
are not the only cause, of course, with macroeconomic
demand being a major factor. Persisting unemployment
in the face of job vacancies, however, does indicate that
there is some mismatch due to labor force entrants having
inadequate skills.
In Africa and Asia, the focus regions of this study, several
trends are apparent. First, the proportion of workers in
agriculture has fallen, but absolute numbers in agriculture
remain roughly constant. Sixty-seven million non-farm
jobs have been created in India, for example, since 2000,
but the number employed in agriculture has remained
constant at 240 million. Second, the demographic advantage
countries in these regions have had could in the
future become instead a major disadvantage, resulting in
too many low-skilled workers.
If education systems fail to respond more rapidly to changing
economies, to expand sufficiently, and to become more
relevant to employment, these skills mismatches seem
likely to increase because of broader trends. Advances in
technology are reducing the demand for low-skill and even
some medium-skill jobs and certainly increase the frequency
with which skills need to be upgraded.
Skills and Individual
Livelihoods 3
Education and skills have strong economic benefits for
people. Studies have looked at number of years in school,
cognitive skills, and at non-cognitive skills. They have
found an average 10 percent private return on individual
earnings for each additional year of schooling and that
the returns to education overall have evolved depending
on the education level and have especially increased for
postprimary education in growing economies, as schooling
levels have increased overall. Beyond just years of
education, there is increasing evidence that cognitive skills
(as measured by standardized literacy tests) are strongly
and significantly associated with individual earnings in
both developed and developing countries. Similarly noncognitive
skills are also highly positively associated with
productivity and earnings in developing countries on the
whole. Private returns to both years of schooling and to
cognitive skills are generally higher in developing than in
developed countries, partly reflecting the greater scarcity
of schooling and of skills in the developing world.
Similarly these returns in developing countries tend to be
higher for women than for men, again reflecting relatively
lower school attendance and so learning by women. This is
in part because women may need only basic literacy skills
to obtain high-paid employment whereas men need higher
levels of literacy. One important study in Pakistan showed
that, for women, the returns to skills were stronger than
those to schooling, but with the opposite result for men,
implying that for men school provides a credentialing that
is missing for women. No long-term trend data are available
for developing countries, but data for OECD countries
does show that the effect of cognitive (literacy) skills on
individual earnings has increased in the last three decades.
Other important findings about specific cognitive skills
include that numeracy skills have particularly high returns
as do computing skills, both across different levels of
development. The evidence on non-cognitive skills is still
3 This section and the one that follows draw heavily on Guison-Dowdy (2012).
10 Innovative Secondary Education For Skills Enhancement (ISESE)