‘Youthful futures? Aspirations, education and employment in Asia’

ABSTRACT

In this editorial article we frame how young people in Asia are reworking rapidly changing socio-economic, cultural conditions and constraining political structures to create possible successful futures and achieve their aspirations. We critically engage with interdisciplinary debates that conceptualise youth futures and provide an overview of current literature on this topic. Using the intense dynamism of the contemporary Asian region as a lens, we examine the complexities of education and employment landscapes young people are attempting to navigate or avoid; and highlight the implications this has for understanding the nexus between education and employment. Finally, this special issue highlights work by Asian and Asia-based scholars and is part of an intellectual project to make Asian young people more visible within Geography, Anthropology and related disciplines. The collection serves as a showcase of inter-disciplinary scholarship focusing on the complexities of young Asian lives in relation to education and employment.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people
• Asia
• education
• employment
• training
• aspirations

Introduction

In large parts of Asia, the spread of formal education, combined with rapid urbanisation, consumerism, and shifts in the region’s volatile economies and labour markets, have sparked young people’s imaginations about what they consider possible and desirable livelihoods and lifestyles. Participation in secondary and tertiary education not only extends youth as a life phase, but often also carries with it social status. Additionally, schooling often changes young people’s expectations about the kinds of jobs they value and their idea of themselves as educated persons. While many Asian youth have the possibility of aspiring towards very different futures than their parents could have imagined at the same age, the routes into such futures can be more risky, demanding and insecure. What are the possibilities and realities of an expanding education system for young Asians? What kinds of employment futures can young men and women aspire to and where do these aspirations come from? What aspects of agency and tactics are young people creating in times of opportunity, contraction and rapid change?

These questions are pertinent at different scales for all young people globally. They are very much of our time and pondered by governments, educationalists, employers, communities, families and young people. Differential geographies and education and employment landscapes impact upon young people unevenly in relation to access, opportunities and success in Asia as well as elsewhere. Nevertheless, across the world, young people are remarkable in their persistence to find, create, adapt and make their education and employment experiences work for them, unfortunately with mixed results. The geographical focus on Asia is intended to add new insights to the literature on this topic,¹ but we are convinced that these insights will echo beyond the Asian context and that readers will find resonance with their own geographically located understandings of young people’s aspirations for education and employment.

This special issue of Children’s Geographies brings together emerging scholars from interdisciplinary backgrounds in cultural anthropology, human geography, sociology, and development studies to better understand the kind of futures that young people aspire to in Asia. It includes an article by Trent Brown, Timothy Scrase and Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase (published as an independent article)² and began life as an Asia Research Institute funded workshop held at the National University of Singapore in May 2014. Participants theorised the promises, realities and problems that young adults (aged 12–30) tackle in relation to education, training and employment. For some, there are many more opportunities for higher education and stable employment, offering prospects for upward social mobility, new consumer lifestyles, and relatively smooth transitions into partnerships, marriage and future family life. Other young people may benefit from better and longer periods of education, but find that there is no space for them in the workforce and so they remain un- or under-employed in relation to their educational qualifications.

The articles in this collection address these issues through qualitative and ethnographic research on youth lives in Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Nepal, and Singapore; drawing East, South and South-East Asia together. This collective of nations shares very many borders (for example, China borders 14 other Asian countries) that have allowed the transference and confluence of people, politics, language, culture and cuisine across and between these sub-regions, but have also maintained complex diversities. Hence, it is vitally important to stress that the region is highly heterogeneous with: differential histories; colonising, colonial and post-colonial experiences; complex geopolitical positions; varying political structures through time and across space; and fascinating arrays of languages, scripts and cultural and religious practices.

Conceptualising youth futures and pathways into education and employment

In exploring these themes, we contribute to a growing literature in the anthropology and sociology of youth, the ‘geographies of labour’ (Buckley, McPhee, and Rogaly 2017) and the ‘geographies of education and aspiration’ (Hanson-Thiem 2009; Holloway, Brown, and Pimlott-Wilson 2011). This scholarship traces the promises and pitfalls of an expanding higher education system for young people’s pathways into work in a comparative, global context. It emphasises the role of education as a contradictory resource in young people’s lives (Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery 2008; Levinson and Holland 1996). On the one hand, participation in secondary and tertiary education broadens young people’s horizons and offers knowledge and skills for social advancement. It is a key site for social reproduction and for governments, young people and their families to imagine different and better futures (Holloway, Brown, and Pimlott-Wilson 2011; Stambach 2017; Waters 2015). Education also works to inculcate notions of social, civic and political responsibilities (often less so of civic and political rights) expected of young men and women within their nations. On the other hand, the pursuit of formal schooling can result in disillusionment or stasis in contexts of high graduate un(der)employment and intensify existing inequalities based on class, caste, race and gender (Bourdieu and Passeron 2000 [1997]; Jeffrey 2010a; Woronov 2015). Globally young people’s employment prospects have been a major area of concern against the backdrop of a neoliberal shift towards flexible accumulation (Harvey 2007), irregular work, and rising youth unemployment (Anagnost, Arai, and Ren 2013; Brinton 2011; Jeffrey 2010a; Lukacs 2015; Sukarieh and Tannock 2015). Consequently, the question of how young people are exiting education and moving, or not moving, into paid work and future livelihoods has received much attention from academics and policy makers alike. We are forced to ask, in such circumstances can young people access jobs, housing and start families of their own and achieve the social markers of adulthood as they move through the life course?

By illuminating how young adults navigate uncertain ‘post-education landscapes’ under conditions of economic prosperity and stagnation (Anagnost, Arai, and Ren 2013; Lukacs 2015; Sukarieh and Tannock 2015), we learn how young people and society experience and re-evaluate the meanings of schooling and being an ‘educated person’ (Brinton 2011; Jeffrey 2010a; Morarji 2016). These studies move away from a tendency in international academic and policy debates to view youth primarily for their potential as future workers and consumers, or to use Western patterns of the ‘transition to adulthood’ as an implicit yardstick for youthful lives in other parts of the world (Hansen et al. 2008, 4). As has become increasingly clear in Western contexts and even more so in Asia, the assumed coherence of a linear progression through normative stages of school, work, marriage and family life does not correspond with the realities of young people’s lives (Johnson-Hanks 2002; Skelton 2002; Valentine 2003). Scholars in youth studies rightfully insist that school and work are not just important for young people’s futures, but also for many other aspects in their present lives, including leisure, personal relationships, family and community (Wyn and White 1997, 114).

While youth researchers take issue with some of the normative ideas surrounding the ‘transition to adulthood’, elements of this framework have been transported to other parts of the world. For example, linear models of youth development about how young people move through chronological time connect well with equally linear narratives about development and progress (Jeffrey 2010b, 12–13). Ideas about normative and standardised youth biographies are also institutionalised in laws and school systems (Cole and Durham 2008, 4) and in the minds of many young people and their families who reference ideas about standardised life biographies and adult respectability even if they cannot or do not always want to fulfil those in real life (Amit and Dyck 2011, 19; Cook 2016, 3)

In other words, youth researchers face a dilemma of how to engage with the element of ‘transition’ in youth. The tension is about recognising that young people do get older and move through different life phases and that ideas about ‘transition’ shape the institutional context in which young people grow up, without assuming that ‘transition’ is the defining feature of young people’s lives in the present (Wyn and White 1997, 94). Therefore, we examine the aspirations of youth on their own terms, without assuming that the transition to adulthood is the driving force behind these aspirations. We use the notion of ‘transition regimes’ (du Bois-Reymond and Stauber 2005, 63; Wyn 2014) to highlight the institutional contexts (education systems, labour markets, legal and welfare regimes) and normative expectations (cultural values, gender ideologies) that categorise young people along institutional and biographical turning points in their lives, such as leaving school and entering work. Such transition regimes interact with young people’s motivations and personalities (and that of their families) to influence their education and work trajectories, mobility and pathways to the future. We reflect on the risk of treating certain normative, middle class goals as universal aspirations and question the ideological underpinnings of contemporary discourses around the role of youth in contemporary Asia. For more insight into ‘transition regimes’ see Chun-Yi Sum’s (2018) focus on the hegemonic logic of more-than-the-formal curriculum for potential employment success in China and Colin Smith’s (2018) concept of young people’s development of alternative transition regimes in Japan.

In exploring the diversity of young Asians’ experiences with education and work, the authors in this special issue adopt a flexible analytical approach in thinking about when and how education, work and consumption become important at certain moments in young people’s lives (Johnson-Hanks 2002). With this collection we make two key contributions, combined with other valuable insights into the context of young people, education and employment in Asia. First, we ‘give voice’ (Appadurai 2004) to young people in Asia, and focus in on their everyday lived experiences through a range of empirical data gathered through working with and listening to the young people themselves. This allows us to explore the socio-cultural, political and spatial issues and concerns they face, and begin a conversation about youthful futures that go beyond socio-economic and demographic data. Our articles show how the opportunities and limitations associated with consumer lifestyles, educational change and labour market restructuring take place at different speeds and in highly geographically and socially uneven ways in contemporary Asia. We also highlight how key social divisions around cultural, class, caste, gender and generational lines shape young people’s orientations to and participation in consumption, education, and work.

Second, we extend the theoretical conversation by paying attention to the ideological work that went into spreading ideas about higher education in the first place and into mobilising young people in the economy (Lukacs 2015, 383; Sukarieh and Tannock 2015). Current youth cohorts are forced and exhorted to be more flexible, entrepreneurial and mobile under a neoliberal ethos that assumes individual merit and responsibility for human capital development (Anagnost, Arai and Ren 2013, 12–13). This often means that failures in relation to work, income or security are seen as young people’s own inabilities rather than part of structural political-economic shifts or neglect. Whether through microcredit schemes aiming to foster youth entrepreneurship in post-conflict Nepal (Snellinger 2018) or state efforts to socialise Singapore engineering students into creative innovators in the knowledge economy (Chia and Cho 2018), this collection shows how youthful lives are implicated in national attempts to position countries favourably in the competition for jobs and global talent (Brown, Lauder, and Ashton 2011).

Yet equally important, we analyse instances where young people do not identify or comply with efforts to reduce them to economic actors or where predetermined ideas about learning, productive personhood and success do not match with complex local realities. Several articles illustrate how young people define their own conditions and explore possibilities for meaningful education, jobs and income through social relations with peers and the adults around them. Sum’s contribution (2018) details students’ frustrations with the quality of teaching in a Chinese elite university and their desires to remedy this situation through participation in extra-curricular activities as potential avenues for self-improvement, friendships, meaningful skills and social experiences. As these and other contributions in our special issue illustrate, young people’s everyday tactics do not so much focus on resistance, but rather resilience and reworking (Katz 2004) of ideologies or contradictory situations over which they have little control, and this includes normative ‘transition regimes.’ For example, Snellinger’s analysis of the contradictory practices of entrepreneurship schemes in Nepal (2018) illustrates how young men are expected to demonstrate resilience and adaptability in order to overcome state neglect. Brown, Scrase, and Ganguly-Scrase (2017) show how young people try overcome the geographical marginalisation of their city, Darjeeling, alongside the impacts of globalisation and neoliberalism, through reworking education opportunities combined with migration in order to attempt to achieve their dreams. Taken together, these studies provide insights that will help to ‘delink the strong association of aspirations with material wealth, educational qualifications and professional employment to explore the range of potential futures that children [young people] aspire to realise’ (Holloway, Brown, and Pimlott-Wilson 2011, 4, our insert). Indeed in the Viewpoints article on youthful politics in Taiwan Hsieh and Skelton (2018) show that young Taiwanese actively identify themselves with cultural values and lifestyle qualities that resist the pressures of taking advantage of the ‘cross-straits bonuses,’ which include more employment opportunities and higher wages offered by Mainland China. They aspire to a different, quieter work-life balance in Taiwan.

In what follows, we first review the relevant trends in education and employment in different parts of Asia. Next, we discuss some of the theoretical challenges of studying youth aspirations as future hopes and everyday goals. Finally, we consider the opportunities and complexities young people are facing around education and work at different moments in their lives and across diverse socio-economic and spatial scales.

Asian dynamism: youthful realities

Asia can be described as one of the most dynamic regions on the planet. It is rapidly transforming, culturally and socially altering in many ways, and urbanising exponentially.³ It is also literally a region ‘on the move’ with the highest figures for intra-regional transnational migration. The education and labour landscapes are changing swiftly: educators, employees and employers can barely keep up with these almost seismic shifts. Young people’s realities mean they are expected to navigate their way through this maelstrom of change from a position of newness and originality very different from generations before, receiving limited state and structural support. Consequently, young people are having to demonstrate all kinds of adaptive, resilient and reworking tactics in order get the education expected and/or required, enter employment which offers limited security and labour rights, without much of a roadmap and yet face immense expectations from their national/ regional governments and older generations.

Here it is useful to provide contextual data for Asia as it plays a remarkable role within the context of global demographic and migration figures, both as numbers and as mobile actors.⁴ Demographically, Asia is home to 60% of the world’s population: 4.4 billion out of 7.1 billion people in 2015 (UNDESA 2015, 1). Except for Japan and Singapore, which have an ageing and/or shrinking population, children and youth aged 10–24 years old are a large and visible presence in the region. More specifically in 2015, Asia was home to 57.67% of the world’s population aged 0–24 years; it is the largest populace of young people on the planet. In 2014, India was home to 356 million young people aged 10–24 (total population 1.3 billion), followed by 269 million in China (total population 1.4 billion) and 67 million in Indonesia (total population 255 million) (UNFPA 2014, 5). Within Asia, children and youth grow up amidst very diverse circumstances and experiences of poverty and affluence, language and culture, politics, life expectancy and the kinds of futures they can imagine. While the complexities of their lives cannot be generalised into a homogeneous ‘Asian picture’, we examine the broader trends in the area to understand the contexts in which young people aspire for school, work, and lifestyles.

To a greater degree than their peers in the West, young Asians have to adapt to fast-paced urbanisation, shifting economic landscapes characterised by growing inequality and problems of climate change and environmental degradation. The geographically uneven and contradictory effects of globalisation and neoliberalism create high growth in strategically positioned industries⁵ and cities alongside relatively isolated or neglected areas (Harvey 2007). Metropolitan cities often become vehicles for national claims and aspirations about modernity, for example through spectacular city architecture or discourses about the bright futures of fast-growing middle classes (Heiman, Liechty, and Freeman 2012; Ong 2011; see also Naafs 2018). Yet, some of the most rapid transformations are happening in rural and peri-urban areas, due to increasing population densities, changing land use patterns, migration flows, industrial and urban development, and growing aspirations for consumption, travel and leisure (Barker, Harms, and Lindquist 2014; Naafs 2012; Webster, Cai, and Muller 2014).

Rural youth seem to be increasingly oriented towards non-agrarian futures as their relations with land change, they pursue new possibilities for migration or non-farm work, or become marginalised because investors value the land but not their labour (Akatiga and White 2015; Rigg 2006). Rural households are diversifying and adapting into ‘multi-local livelihoods’: combining farming with (circular) migration to consolidate their earnings or as a ‘spatial fix’ to mitigate limited jobs and education opportunities at home (Elmhirst 2012, 132). Though not exclusive to youth, it is often the younger generation who migrates and commutes: to look for higher education (Smith and Gergan 2015; Waters 2015) or apprenticeship opportunities (Chea and Huijsmans 2018); for jobs and incomes; to gain experience before travelling internationally, or, especially in the case of Asian women, for marriage (Alipio, Lu, and Yeoh 2015).⁶ This feminised mobility has substantive impact on social, cultural and demographic transformations in both the communities of origin and destination.⁷

Another well-known example of this is the recruitment of rural, unmarried, young women into factory employment in the 1980s and 1990s after multinational companies moved their production sites to export processing zones in Asia (Jacka 2005; Mills 2003; Wolf 1992). Comparative literature shows how young women’s decisions to enter factory work stem from a range of considerations about money, filial piety, a desire to gain experience and participate in consumption and modernity. These studies also examine young women’s ambiguous experiences with migration and factory work, and the effects this had in destabilising patriarchal, family and rural-urban hierarchies. As they carved out new social space as workers, consumers and daughters, they also became a flash point for wider moral panics about young women’s behaviour and sexuality. More broadly, this example highlights how rural populations are mobilised into an intra-Asian competition between countries to attract foreign investment through tax incentives and availability of a cheap, flexible labour force.

The social position of factory workers is very different from that of urban middle class youth, specifically university students, who occupy a more privileged place in the national imagination. In colonial times and the twentieth century they were trained as cadres of civil servants and considered part of the future intelligentsia and professionals. Politically, they have played important roles in bringing about regime change, but their political activism has also been repressed. Particularly under authoritarian or developmental regimes, students have been more narrowly framed in terms of the technocratic and economic contributions they are expected to make to modernisation and national development (Weiss, Aspinall, and Thompson 2012, 10–11). Today, they are the faces of the growing middle classes in countries like China, India and Indonesia where popular discourses of ‘rising Asia’ mark them as consumers, innovators and skilled professionals who are hoped to transform the regional economy from a manufacturing into a consumption hub (Gilbertson 2017).

These examples indicate how groups of youth are framed differently for political and economic purposes. As Sukarieh and Tannock (2015, 37) aptly summarise:

employers (and the state) have often targeted youth, both female and male, as a distinct part of the population available for providing cheap, surplus, temporary and easy-to-discipline labour that can be drawn upon for attracting new investment, expanding into new markets, and developing new products and services.

As connoted by Marx’s concept of ‘reserve army of labour’, throughout history and in different places young people have moved in and out of formal employment depending on cycles of technological change and boom and bust in the economy.

Education: complex pedagogic and studying environments

Amidst such heightened aspirations, education has become increasingly important. In the early decades after the Second World War, many newly established governments in the region inherited a poor higher education system from their former colonisers. Often, the available education structure consisted of local vernacular schools, religious institutions and a few government universities in the major cities where a minority of indigenous elite youth were trained as civil servants in the colonial bureaucracy or technical supervisors in agrarian and industrial corporations (Weiss, Aspinall, and Thompson 2012, 13). In the second half of the twentieth century, many postcolonial governments faced enormous challenges to improve their populations’ literacy skills, build schools to widen access for both genders, reduce the gap between rural and urban areas, recruit and train new teachers, and develop the quality of the curriculum. Not surprisingly, these problems are easier addressed in Japan and other affluent East Asian countries and small city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong, than vast ‘lower middle income’ countries like China, India and Indonesia, or poorer countries like Cambodia, Laos and Nepal.

Nevertheless, the general trend is clearly towards longer and better education attainment for young people at all levels. Although universal primary education is yet to be realised in all countries, participation in secondary education is increasingly considered the norm, even though enrolments in upper secondary remain uneven. Furthermore, the 1990s and 2000s have seen a dramatic expansion of tertiary education. Globally, enrolment rates in university (at bachelor degree level) grew from 32.6 million in 1970 to 182.2 million in 2011, with East and Southeast Asia accounting for 46% of this growth, rendering Asia the locus of a substantial part of global higher education expansion (UNESCO 2014, 16).

The higher education landscape is not just expanding, but also becoming more diverse, commercial and international (Shin and Harman 2009; Waters 2015; Welch 2011). Since the 1990s and 2000s, many universities started marketing their services to international students through English language instruction, online long distance learning, joint degrees, student exchanges and other forms of collaboration. Asia is at the forefront of this trend and is fast becoming a global outpost for the internationalisation of higher education (UNESCO 2014, 11). Singapore and Hong Kong have emerged as important higher education hubs between East and Southeast Asia (Cheng 2014; Sidhu, Ho, and Yeoh 2011; see also Wai-chi Chee 2018), and Australian universities are targeting a growing market of Asian students (Shin and Harman 2009, 10). China and India are not just influential as regional higher education providers, but also as the world’s largest exporters of international students (Altbach 2009, 18–19). The literature on East Asia describes a particularly competitive higher education landscape, where middle class and more affluent families are increasingly turning to English language degrees from ‘better quality’ universities overseas as part of their efforts to gain cultural prestige and reproduce class advantage (Waters 2015).

Japan and South Korea achieved university enrolment rates that match or surpass those of Western countries several decades ago (Yeung and Alipio 2013, 10) with at least 50% of their youth populations enrolled in tertiary education (UNESCO 2014, 17). Tertiary education is still a privilege for a minority of youth in Laos where in 2015 around 17% of youth in relevant age group went to university. In such contexts, tertiary education provision is often socially restricted to youth from wealthier families and geographically to the major cities. In China, India and Indonesia education is institutionalised at secondary school level, often not (yet) the norm at tertiary level, but this is changing dramatically, especially in China (with 43% of youth in the relevant age group in China, 26.8% in India and 24% in Indonesia enrolled in 2015).⁸ Many smaller cities now have their own universities, vocational schools, and English language instruction centres, attracting rural and urban students from both genders across different class backgrounds (Barker, Harms, and Lindquist 2014, 9–11; UNESCO 2014).

The bulk of these newly established polytechnics and universities are in private higher education with fee-paying students. In Indonesia, for example, less than 100 of approximately 3,400 tertiary education institutes are public (Suryadarma and Jones 2013, 9). While tuition fees at Indonesian state universities tend to be fairly low, costs at private institutes vary but can add up quickly, prompting complaints that students are treated as consumers by institutes that have become too business-like (Heyward and Sopantini 2013, 85–86). The growth of private higher education reduces the elitism formerly associated with the university system. They absorb growing numbers of students, contain government costs of higher education provision, and promote curricula that are more in tune with demands from employers. Yet, such institutes sometimes overly focus on certain study areas such as English, IT or business studies (Welch 2011, 4). Regulation of costs, quality and effectiveness can be difficult, especially in countries where corruption is a problem (Songkaeo and Yeong 2016, 25; Welch 2011, 16–17).

Rethinking the nexus between education and employment

Weiss, Aspinall, and Thompson (2012, 15) note how each phase of rapid higher education expansion creates its own opportunities and difficulties. For example, in the early phases of dramatic higher education expansion, the newly added colleges and universities typically grow faster than the actual pace of economic growth. In such contexts, ‘The quality of the facilities and teaching provided often fall far short of students’ expectations and their future job prospects may be far from secure.’ Except for a small number of elite private higher education institutes that are of high quality, many private institutes are ranked at the lower end of the national education hierarchies within their countries (UNESCO 2014).

Moreover, studies indicate that for students from lower middle class or farming backgrounds, or relatively new entrants into the higher education system ‘education can be a double edged sword’ (Donner 2017). Partly, this is related to lack of jobs, problems of graduate underemployment and political realities that cannot be solved through education. However, studies suggest that the current ideological focus that connects education to very particular aspirations for employment and development goals might be aggravating how young people and their families experience such problems.

Increasingly, education policy in international development discourse has been informed by a concern with individual employability and national competitiveness in the global knowledge economy (Hanson-Thiem 2009, 16). The dominance of human capital theory, part of a broader neoliberal logic and on-going ‘economisation of higher education’ (Spring 2015, 2), presents a break with education philosophies based on values of knowledge production, civic education, multiculturalism and nation-building (Mitchell 2003, 388). Although ideas multiculturalism and nation-building continue to be important in official school curricula and religious teachings, human capital theory has influenced governments’ and people’s understandings about the links between education, employment and the economy. It posits that personal investment in education will result in national economic growth, employment and less inequality. It seeks to instil values of personal responsibility, competition and entrepreneurial risk-taking in students (Gooptu 2013; Hoffman 2010; Woronov 2015). Under this logic, it is assumed that trade and entrepreneurship by businesses and individuals are essential to increase productivity, technological innovation and prosperity. One of the enduring legacies of neoliberal ideology is that economic rationality has filtered into many non-economic realms of everyday life, including education, work, consumption and popular culture (Brown 2016; Gooptu 2013).

Such ideas create a divide about what kind of jobs and futures are valued, often involving a bias towards middle class, metropolitan futures that has implications for the rest. This is observed starkly in China where the administrative hukou system disadvantages rural youth and creates an urban bias in markets for work and higher education (Hoffman 2010; Jacka 2005). This is coupled with popular stereotypes that frame rural populations as ‘lacking quality’ (Murphy 2004) or urban vocational students as ‘academic failures’ even though they comprise 50% of the total students enrolled at secondary level (Woronov 2015).

In rural North India, Morarji (2016) reflects on the difficulties that arise when the dominant discourse of ‘education as development’ taught in schools devalues manual farm work and instils particular gendered aspirations in young people of ‘becoming someone’ through middle class goals of urbanised jobs, lifestyles and identities. Such aspirations are difficult to realise through either jobs in the urban informal or the rural economy, and create conflicting tensions and expectations in the village between youth and parents. Writing about Kathmandu, Nepal Kölbel (2013) similarly asks what is gained when education is primarily framed in terms of economic investment and future benefits if this sets young people up for expectations that cannot be met. Even in contexts of educational and professional ‘success’, scholars note the psychological burden on students in China’s elite universities (Bregnbaek 2016) and restrictions of Japan’s salary man ideal (see Smith 2018). Such geographical, gendered and class-based pressures and divisions are often glossed over in the neutral language of education ‘aspirations’, yet are important to address. The notion of ‘education aspirations’ appears to be an acceptable and appropriate goal for young people. However the term is far from neutral because of inevitable geographical, gendered, ethnicised and classed inequalities that impact upon young people; their playing field is far from even.

Employment and changing pathways into work

Current generations of youth in Asia are better educated than before, but the jobs matching the skills level of a higher educated workforce are not always there and young people’s pathways into work are changing. In East Asia scholars highlight a substantial increase in casual and flexible employment, affecting particular groups in society (youth, middle-aged adults, women, contract workers) and resulting in lower incomes, limited job training and career prospects, less employment security and delays in family formation (Gordon 2017; Lukacs 2015). The post-industrial restructuring of society since the 1980s and shift towards flexible jobs in service industries created a breakdown of previous institutional links between schools and employers, unemployment and new cultural understandings about work, such as the concept of freeters (Brinton 2011; Cook 2016; Smith 2018). In former developmental states like Japan and South Korea, the state carefully planned the economy and institutionalised strong links between families, school and companies. This led to a particular type of school-work transition where it was the school’s responsibility to place students in a company or large state-owned corporations, resulting in occupational stability and particular historical, gendered and class-based notions of employment-based prestige (e.g. Japan’s ‘salary man’ ideal). In China too, young professionals and companies are increasingly expected to seek each other out on job fairs instead of state-organised job assignments (Hoffman 2010) since the government turned away from centralised planning after opening up to the market economy in the post-Mao era. Such government attempts to stay globally competitive, offer flexibility and reduced labour costs to companies, but diminish young people’s employment security and their possible futures (Gordon 2017, 10; Lukacs 2015, 383).

Although this is a relatively recent development in East Asia, in many other countries in South and Southeast Asia the informal economy is very large and expanding, often comprising between 60% and 90% of the overall economy. In countries like India, Indonesia, Nepal, Laos and Cambodia precarity and informality are common conditions and not recent transformations of previous patterns (Hewison and Kalleberg 2012). Despite rapid higher education expansion and young people’s hope this will facilitate entry into formal employment, many continue to live and work in insecure conditions. The articles in our special issue about young people’s employment prospects and experiences in often highly informal and politicised labour markets, produce important insights about how young adults adapt to and tackle issues of bribes and nepotism, illicit activities, migration and activism. These discussions underline the need to pay close attention to ways neoliberalism and globalisation play out across different spatial scales, and how they are negotiated through young people’s relations with each other and the adults around them.

The collection

All papers in this special issue focus on the vast and varied world region of Asia, engaging with eight nations and the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong. Each article analyses specific aspects of education and/or employment and the ways in which young people connect or disconnect with these institutions and practices as part of their (re)working and (re)configuring of what their aspirational futures might be. The papers combine ‘big picture’ theories, concepts and issues outlined above with grounded rigorous empirical research. The Viewpoint piece for this issue, by Yu-Chieh Hsieh and Tracey Skelton, provides a different perspective on young people’s lives in Asia. It examines the geopolitical politics and everyday resistance of the Student Sunflower Movement in Taiwan that took place in 2014 and continues to resonate to this day.

Chun-Yi Sum’s article connects with the extensive and problematic shifts taking place in Chinese universities. She explores how students realise that the intense competitive labour for a university place delivers little but disappointment in classroom sessions they consider ‘watery’ and diluted. Through extra-curricular activities students seek out meaningful learning experiences independently of the constraining classroom sessions. Students hope to have social connections, emotional sensitivities, and experience something of substance to help them navigate the changing society and economy. While such aspirations are not always fulfilled in the hierarchical and conservative university system, the focus on extra-curricular activities provides important insights into the slippages and contradictions between individual, collectivist, and neoliberal understandings of higher education.

Focusing on ‘UniTech’ university in Singapore, Arthur Chia and Mihye Cho explore students’ engagement with an engineering curriculum that is oriented around design. It seeks to train them to be creative and entrepreneurial, ready to enter a ‘knowledge-based economy’. Engineering courses have to respond swiftly in a changing economy and attract aspirational students who want to engage innovatively and effectively through hands-on learning. Working with the notion of the hidden curriculum they explore how the Singaporean government, industry and the university, socialise students towards particular types of aspiration that will connect with a national economic agenda.

Moving from China and Singapore, Lyda Chea and Roy Huijsmans explore informal and privately organised skills development and technical and vocational education training (TVET) spaces in rural Lao and urban Cambodia. They demonstrate a mismatch between policy and provision and the realities of how young Laotians and Cambodians gain the skills necessary for the informal economies they are part of, paying close attention to the ways in which gender matters. They argue that household-based TVET schemes are often devalued and yet they provide essential informal learning spaces for young people’s acquisition of relevant skills so necessary for finding work and ‘being someone’ in the informal sectors.

Suzanne Naafs’ paper draws us towards employment and aspirational possibilities for urban lower middle class youth in Indonesia. The article explores the notion of being middle class as aspiration alongside the challenges young people face in finding employment and developing social connections. Stable jobs are desired but hardly available, nepotism and corruption are rife and deepen structural inequalities. Yet young people remain committed to jobs that will deliver more than income but afford types of consumption and lifestyles that drive their imagined futures.

In the post-conflict setting of Nepal, Amanda Snellinger’s article focuses on the Youth, Small Enterprise and Self-Employment Fund (YSEF), which is targeted at marginalised young people to fulfil their aspirations. However, she clearly demonstrates that through administrative inadequacy and corruption, the complex geopolitical geography of the Nepal-Indian border, and the risks involved in small enterprises in poorly resourced rural areas young people’s entrepreneurialism is tested to the limit, despite their hard work and commitment to playing by the rules. In response young people utilise tactics and strategies to circumvent official state approaches and find their own routes to self-employment.

Colin Smith’s article demonstrates the ways in which young Japanese currently face labour casualisation and need to negotiate the changing economy through their own resources and choices. The article draws upon the concept of transition regimes and explores in close detail how young people resist Japanese-normative career development and develop alternative transitional practice that is precarious but affords them a sense of autonomy and self-orientation.

Located in Hong Kong, Wai-chi Chee pays close attention to a little researched population, Pakistani-migrant families with children born or brought up in the city. She demonstrates that while Pakistani parents and their children hold high aspirations for education they are constrained by language problems, an education structure that actively marginalises ethnic minorities, and wider Pakistani-community cultural expectations, especially around girls’ education. Nevertheless, she illuminates how Pakistani-descent youth are determined to achieve education qualifications that will give them greater access to employment opportunities than experienced by their parents.

Brown, Scrase, and Ganguly-Scrase (2017) provide insight into young people’s aspirations and experiences in Indian regional towns. Exposed to urban youth cultures through education and media young people are convinced that being in larger Indian cities will fulfil their employment dreams; they desire to migrate but are hampered by familial expectations of duty and the peripheral geography of their regional town. The Indian neo-liberal shift has created optimism among young people in the largest cities while simultaneously closing down possibilities for regional locales.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank John Horton for his very positive and enduring support for this special issue and are grateful for the two anonymous reviewers for this article for their valuable suggestions. Finally also, we want to thank the participants in the workshop for stimulating discussions and the authors for their contributions to this collection, it was great working with you all.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge the financial and administrative support from the Asia Research Institute and Family, Children and Youth Research Cluster of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore that funded our workshop in May 2014 (grant N-39500-017-133).

Notes

1 See Skelton (2012) for an engagement with the earlier status of scholarship focusing on Asia in this journal.

2 Brown, Scrase and Ganguly-Scrase’s article, (2017) was to be part of this special issue but through a technical production error it was published in an earlier issue. The article is currently free to access and should be read as part of this special issue.

3 The Demographic World Urban Areas Index 2015 identified the world’s top 20 mega cities, 14 of those cities are in Asia (3 apiece in China and India, 2 in Japan, and I each in Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand). Their population sizes range from 37.8 million (Tokyo-Yokahama) to 14.6 million in Kolkata. https://www.allianz.com/en/about_us/open-knowledge/topics/demography/articles/150316-top-20-megacities-by-population.html/#!m4432cf0e-cb70-4ff1-bc0e-5e5c2797e856.

4 In 2015 Asia became the ‘largest regional migration corridor in the world’ (UNDESA 2015, 3) with 59 million people born in Asia now residing in another Asian country.

5 For example, large-scale agribusinesses and plantations, manufacturing industries in export processing zones, business parks with clusters of companies in technology or finance.

6 The United Nations (UN) estimates that there are 232 million international migrants, which constitute 3.2% of the world’s 7.2 billion people. At the global scale 35 million international migrants are under the age of 20 and a further 40 million are aged 20 to 29. These combined figures show that youthful migrants make up a third of all migrants. (UN World Youth Report 2013, 19). In 2015 15% of all global migrants were under the age of 20, and young migrants made up 22% of migrants in the developing regions.

7 See a special section on Asian Children and Transnational Migration, in Children’s Geographies 13(3): 255–399 for more analysis of these effects.

8 Source: UNESCO Statistical Database, available from www.uis.unesco.org. The UN World Youth Report (2013), 22 demonstrates that the numbers of students attending tertiary education institutions abroad increased from 2 million in 2000 to 3.6 million in 2010; a 78% increase. The Asian countries of China, India and the Republic of South Korea are the main sources of international students. The majority of these students go to the US forming 19% of the world total, followed by the UK at 11% with decreasing percentage numbers in Australia, France, Germany and Japan.