Coronavirus has dealt class of 2020 a bad hand, but China’s class of ’77 offers an encouraging lesson
- While graduating in a recession year can hit earnings and career prospects, life eventually rights itself, as the experience of the first batch of Chinese university students who graduated after the Cultural Revolution shows
Frankly, it is not a good moment for most families – as I was reminded this week, sharing farewell drinks with a long-serving Cathay Pacific pilot friend whose once secure future has crumbled around him and his family. This pandemic-induced recession is set to wreck millions of lives in countries across the world.
But I still feel a special sense of pain for our precariously poised students, in particular those graduating from university or college this year, as they try to secure that first tentative toehold in the working world.
Perhaps the empathy comes from my own traumatic memories as a student in the middle of recession-ridden Britain in the early 1970s. I remember walking awkwardly past the young street sleepers in freezing cold London doorways and shivering at the thought that this might be my plight at some point in the future.
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Since the US earns around US$45 billion a year from international students, directly supporting 458,000 jobs, think also of the hundreds of US colleges and universities now facing financial crisis.
Beyond the immediate pain for students seeking to enter the workforce, numerous studies show that graduating into a recession carries costs that can persist for years.
Even those getting jobs earn on average 9 per cent less annually than students graduating into a strong economy. They on average find less stable jobs in smaller companies, and frequently have to consider jobs far from their preferred career choices. It takes between 10 and 15 years for their incomes to catch up with those earned by students graduating into a buoyant economy.
Students graduating into a recession find themselves struggling to pay off student loans, being forced to live with their parents longer, marry later, start families later, and buy their first home later.
But before we indulge in too much pity for our class of 2020, we should spare a thought for those in China who lived through Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, during which universities and colleges were closed for 12 years from 1965 to 1977, kept open only for workers, peasants and soldiers who were selected based on their revolutionary fervour.
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I have always had a special empathy for those millions of smart and aspiring youngsters who, instead of going to university, were in large numbers rusticated to remote and impoverished corners of the country to “learn through labour”.
If any group got more than their share of rotten luck, it was them. I was their age, and if I had by chance been born in China, I would have shared their awful fate.
Mao’s catastrophic mistake cast a shadow across China for decades. With universities closed for so long, a whole generation of straw-in-mouth rustics rose up the ranks across China, impacting the country’s technocratic capabilities for decades, until they began to retire, or died around the turn of the century.
On the brighter side, remember the now-legendary class of ’77, drawn from the 5.7 million people, many of them victims of that lost decade, who sat meritocratic exams for university places at the end of 1977, when Deng Xiaoping finally reopened the universities.
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Li Keqiang, now China’s prime minister, was one of thousands of brilliant technocrats from the class of ’77 who have gradually leapfrogged up through China’s ranks to lead the country today.
So even in these darkest of student times, life is likely in due course to right itself. Experts say there are specific things governments and employers can do: forgive student loans, subsidise further study in areas where new skills are most likely to be needed, incentivise employers to hire.
As for our unlucky students, the advice seems to be to stay healthy, to stay flexible and patient, to focus on spare-time projects and the accumulation of skills. And perhaps most important of all, not to lose hope. Serendipity can be kind as well as cruel.
David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view
