Armed with higher education, more certificates and better English skills, they should be expected to land jobs more easily and live more happily than their parents. In reality, however, they have more difficulty finding work, delay marriage and can scarcely dream of owning their own home.
A recent research by Statistics Korea paints an ironical contrast between the lives of the baby boomer generation born in 1955-63 and their children’s generation born in 1979-92, which is termed by demographers as the echo boom generation.
Serious thoughts should be given to what causes the hardships those in their 20s and early 30s suffer at the initial stage of establishing their lives as a full member of society and how to help alleviate them. It is worrisome for the younger generation to be left in prolonged predicaments as they are demographically supposed to underpin our society in the coming decades.
As of the end of 2010, the numbers of baby boomers and echo boomers stood at 6.95 million and 9.54 million, respectively. Combined, the two demographic groups accounted for 34.4 percent of the population.
Those with college or higher education took up 75.6 percent of the echo generation, compared with only 12.5 percent of their parents’ generation.
But the employment rate of the echo boomers remained at 48.6 percent, far below 75.7 percent for the baby boom generation. Only 15.4 percent of the echo generation owned a house.
Unstable economic status has delayed the average age of getting married from 27.9 to 31.9 for men and from 24.8 to 29.1 for women over the past two decades. The number of single-member households exceeded 1 million among the echo generation, while the corresponding figure remained at about 580,000 among the baby boom generation. Possibly reflecting their more down-to-earth outlook, the proportion of echo boomers with religion was slightly over 50 percent, compared with nearly 60 percent for the baby boom generation.
While married women in the baby boomer generation gave birth to an average 2.04 babies, those in the echo generation bore only 1.1 children on average, causing concerns over a rapid shrinkage of the population.
The high jobless rate among youths, which is the main reason for their retarded life, is attributed to the shortage of decent jobs offered by large private companies and public corporations and their shunning of low-paid and hard work at small and medium-sized manufacturing firms. The proportion of college graduates who have given up efforts to land jobs increased by more than 8 percentage points over the past three years to 25 percent this year, according to a study by a local research institute.
What makes the matter worse is that many youths are trying to secure stable economic status by further raising their academic qualifications only to find themselves still jobless, exacerbating the job mismatch. In this sense, echo boomers may be to blame at least partly for their high unemployment rate and need to lower their job expectations.
But it should not exempt the government and businesses from their responsibility for offering more work acceptable to jobseekers of the echo generation.
The government should lead businesses to create more jobs especially in information and technology, culture and services industries, in which echo boomers are more competitive.
It would also help reduce the overeducated workforce for large companies to offer more jobs suitable for high school graduates. Small manufacturers, for their part, need to improve their workplace environment and increase payments to make their jobs more attractive to well-educated echo boomers.
