Otto Granados Roldán
If youth is a disease cured by age, as George Bernard Shaw seems to have said, new and old generations are squeezing every last drop out of the condition while they wait for the vaccine of age to arrive.
The former are doing so to claim what they believe is rightfully theirs and that capitalism, neoliberalism, the state, or the rights-based society—whatever that means—is not granting them. The latter are doing so to perform biblical contrition, that is, an act of repentance for their (alleged) sins, from exclusion, meritocracy, inequality, unemployment, and violence, to climate change, forced migration, the spread of disease, the suspension of working from home, or the lack of access to healthcare, good, affordable, and centrally located housing, of course, and free internet.
However, does this quick summary sufficiently explain what we might call the romanticization of youth, its idealization as something inherently positive, and not simply a biological category? Perhaps not, and this text aims to place the reflection in a perspective different from the prevailing binary logic—heroes or villains, good or bad, right or left, generations X/Y/Z or decrepit older adults—to find degrees, reasoning, and nuances that help to understand better the relationship, which today seems problematic, between youth, education, politics, and merit.
Is youth a problem?
Better understanding contemporary youth, involving them in the construction of citizenship, making them participate in common concerns, and sensitizing them to the solutions, by definition collective, to the most pressing problems of a society and a country, has become one of the most intricate sociological, psychological, and political subjects today. It brings together economic, technological, educational, cultural, and urban factors that, taken together, seem like a very difficult puzzle to put together successfully.
The truth is that, judging by the changes taking place everywhere and their effects—the end of the demographic dividend, aging, unwanted loneliness, human capital shortages, pension crises—this diverse, heterogeneous, and contrasting age group we call youth is and will continue to be decisive in promoting action that facilitates the achievement of the shared public goods that every society desires.
In this vein, understanding and interacting with youth is a multifaceted challenge in these times, and to avoid clichés, intellectual dilettantism, or trendy therapies, it should be approached from different angles: democracy and politics, economics and well-being, education and culture, and violence and mental health. Let’s look at some of them.
Education, mobility, and advancement
First of all, access to higher education is at an all-time high. There are currently 264 million university students worldwide, and enrollment will continue to grow until 2060 or 2070, when it will begin to decline. With variations between countries, more than 55% of enrollment is now made up of women, and a third of all students come from low-income families.1 There is a process of inclusion, insufficient and slow, but well underway.
Another piece of good news is that, according to the World Bank, the rate of return on college education is on average 15% globally (and 1 percentage point higher in Latin America). However, imbalances between the supply of graduates and the demand of the economy are already evident everywhere; skills and competency gaps, especially in more sophisticated economies (the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that 40,000 employers worldwide cannot find the talent they need and the global shortage of software engineers could reach 85 million by 2030); skepticism about the real value of a degree (in the U.S., 63% of adults believe that it is no longer worth the time and money invested, compared to only 40% ten years ago2) and, therefore, higher unemployment and lower incomes among young people with higher education. In Mexico, surveys from 2016 and 2024 show that the average quarterly income for people who went to college has remained constant or declined.
In conclusion, if college is no longer an automatic passport to good jobs, entrepreneurship, and income, better life expectations, and more material satisfaction, a logical effect occurs: pessimism and disenchantment, the fear of becoming the new outcasts of the working world, in which the promise of a degree has been broken. These frustrations are vented against the institutions that young people believe are responsible for the problem: universities, politicians, governments, the economy, and the model.
A second aspect is equally challenging but not necessarily positive. Although there are more students, more universities, and more access, judging by the gap data, the correlation between education and employability does not appear to be high. Technological advances are unstoppable, transforming the nature of work and creating jobs that demand new skills. The consequence is that “organizations are facing a critical shortage of talent worldwide.” Workforce identified in its periodic surveys that around 85% of employers in Germany and Israel report the greatest difficulty in filling positions. In comparison, those in Poland and Colombia report the least difficulty: 59%.
To avoid the harsh reality, those of the old school believe that university classrooms should not revolve around employability or the economy, but rather around the kindness, humanism, and beauty that students breathe within them. As a poetic solution, it sounds good. Still, in the real world, competition is fierce and savage: for example, in the INEGI employment survey of June 2025, the percentage of unemployed people with higher education in Mexico was 36.8%, which at that time equated to around 600,000 unemployed. That percentage has been rising over the last decade and a half.
Note what could be a hypothesis: the most complex, innovative, and sophisticated economies—such as Israel, which has 4,800 startups and the most emerging companies per capita in the world—face the greatest bottlenecks in recruiting the profiles they need. The question naturally arises: did young graduates aged 23-24 make the best educational choice, perform well, and leave well-trained to enter these economies? And if they don’t succeed, who is to blame?
Third, it is said that younger generations are better prepared, and, in a quantitative sense, this is true. In 1950, a person could normally expect to receive just over 2.5 years of schooling; today, it is 9 years in low-income countries and 14 in high-income countries. But recent studies suggest that the IQs of these generations are taking on different profiles.
A study by Northwestern University shows that the Flynn Effect—the sustained increase in intelligence test scores over the past four decades—has stalled and is even reversing, at least in some key categories of these tests. The data showed declines among young people in verbal reasoning, visual problem solving, and matrix reasoning, computational and mathematical skills; in the latter discipline, the University of California, San Diego, found in a recent report a sharp decline in the academic preparedness of its first-year students; the number of those needing remedial math courses skyrocketed from 1 in 100 to 1 in 8 students.7 In contrast, scores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation) show an upward trend, as do scores in abstract reasoning.
There is still no conclusive explanation for the elements that prove this trend, but the data are suggestive.
The fourth aspect, probably related to the previous ones, is the so-called “quarter-life crisis.” According to some research, this group seems more aware of their mental health, but social media and other factors cause them depression and anxiety. They believe they have worse prospects for the future than their parents did and resent an economic situation that makes it more difficult to consolidate a life plan or, rather, to imagine a life plan. Remember the 24-year-old who stabbed Salman Rushdie in 2022. He lived confined for four years in the basement of his home and, according to the writer, was “entirely a product of new information technologies… The great manufacturers of collective thought, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, as well as violent video games, were his teachers. Added to what appeared to be a malleable personality that found in Islamic fundamentalism a framework for the identity he required, they produced a self that was on the verge of becoming a murderer.” 8 While this case may seem extreme and psychological research is not yet conclusive, various empirical studies suggest the need to look more closely at the phenomenon as a whole and, in particular, at the correlation that may exist between the different variables of atypical behavior in young people.
A scientific study9 that included responses from 44 countries points to worrying conclusions about the malaise of the younger generations, compared to the self-perceived satisfaction of their elders. For example, rates of depression and anxiety among adolescents shot up by 50%, and suicide rates by 32%. Members of the so-called Generation Z—born between 1997 and 2012—began to suffer from these and other mental disorders, reaching higher levels than any other generation in history. 10 The suicide rate among adolescents in the European Union has also increased, with Spain rising from 1.99 to 2.94 per 100,000 young people aged 15 to 19 between 2011 and 2022.
According to a report by PLOS One, youth unhappiness has been clearly on the rise since 2012. However, there is still insufficient evidence to explain what happened at that time to clarify why its global impact continues today. Along the same lines, there are signs that, for the first time in modern U.S. history, millennials and Generation Z now attend church more frequently than baby boomers and older generations, who once formed the backbone of American Christianity. 11
Put somewhat bluntly, that idyllic life to which we aspire, that is, the virtuous circle of person-family, less demanding work, shorter working hours, and high and rising wages, seems very difficult to harmonize in these times. Is it the most pleasant horizon? Of course not, but it is what it is.
Real politics or media politics?
The four tracks described above have found expression in political terms, whether in some young elected leaders (Daniel Noboa in Ecuador or Gabriel Boric in Chile, for example), in street protests (Nepal, Peru, Bangladesh, and Morocco), or in movements that have succeeded in overthrowing governments (as in the Philippines, Lebanon, and Sudan), in which there are underlying social factors that are legitimate and explainable in their origin but not necessarily in their outcome.
On the one hand, it is unclear whether shouting and crowds mean anything more in political or programmatic terms, whether such demonstrations have sufficient power and clarity to bring about change in the current state of affairs, or whether they are simply part of a hybrid, indefinable, amorphous landscape, such as that of the public arena in many countries. Despite the sympathy they arouse, not without a certain media kitsch, these movements without recognizable acronyms or organization lack an ideological axis and a narrative that unites them and drives change or transition to dismantle a regime, which is a very patient and complex process that requires conceptual and strategic vision, prolonged political skill, and efforts at inclusion. In short, there appears to be no positive correlation between youth participation in protests and a decline in youth unemployment rates, nor does the mere replacement of a head of state improve their economic well-being.12
On the other hand, we must ask whether we can deduce that youth is, in itself, an automatic talisman for political success. It is one thing to recognize the natural characteristics of a vibrant and vocal youth, and quite another to see in them the signs of a velvet revolution, a renewed spring, or a belated glasnost. Right now, none of that seems to be the case. In fact, the old dilemmas about how to integrate young people into public life or how to respond to their demands sound somewhat trite; at the end of the day, each person becomes involved in politics or other activities with a similar public impact as best they can, without predetermined paths from above or from outside.
The combination of these elements, in turn, generates two effects. On the one hand, the potential that younger generations would eventually have—energy, drive, audacity, for example—is lost because these qualities are concentrated in a dynamic whose frames of reference are not to build true political leadership to produce lasting public satisfaction, but rather a resource to compensate for private desires. On the other hand, it prevents us from recognizing that in politics, major changes are achieved through decisions informed by experience, good judgment, keen intuition, sound risk management, knowledge, information, and an understanding of history. Becoming a strategic leader does not depend on age; in other words, mere youth does not seem to be an automatic ticket to paradise.
Numerous reports regularly document that people in many countries are angry with politicians, disappointed with democracy, disenchanted with institutions, and uncertain about the future, but these feelings are not exclusive to young people; they are part of a mood that cuts across the social fabric. Youthful expressions, however striking, musical, and colorful they may be, do not seem to have any organicity or to be transforming the order of things.
Finally, after all of the above, what place do words such as “merit,” “preparation,” “education,” “effort,” “hard work,” “perseverance,” “discipline,” and other common-sense terms occupy in the mental map of young people? For now, it seems that they have been losing weight as the policy of shortcuts, which always fails, advances.
For some years now, there has been a tendency to demolish merit and replace it with taxes, subsidies, scholarships, transfers – “a form of bribery of the people,” as Tony Blair called them—and a set of populist policies that, as the evidence shows,13 are seductive but do not work in terms of equity, high, productive, innovative, and sustainable growth, or formal, good-quality jobs, which together are the scaffolding of wealth. The reason is very simple: one is the representation of the world, and the other is its reality.
This is the impasse—essentially pedagogical and psychological—in which the old and new generations are trapped. Some do not know how to act or where to go; others are afraid because they did not expect to encounter any of this. Clearing the way out is not easy, nor is there a navigation map to guide people or policies with mathematical precision, because life is an experience of trial and error, and social issues are not an exact science. Nor is there a single model because the characteristics inherent in the human condition are not those of a robot, and for many of them—happiness, consciousness, loneliness, sadness, enthusiasm, cunning, initiative, and a long list of others—we do not know with complete certainty their causes, nor how to accommodate them in the biochemistry of increasingly complex individuals, societies, and countries.
A comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon will be slow and gradual, and addressing it will be even more so. ~
- Sources: UNESCO; OEI, Diagnostic Report on Higher Education in Ibero-America, 2019; Red Índices, IESALC-UNESCO Institute for Statistics, November 2020; Calderón, A. Massification of Higher Education Revisited, Melbourne, RMIT University, 2012; G. Ríos et al., Higher Education, Productivity, and Competitiveness in Ibero-America, OEI/IIEyP, 2020. ↩︎
- Survey available at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic-shift-americans-no-longer-see-four-year-college-degrees-rcna243672. Accessed January 23, 2026. ↩︎
- Available at https://ecosistemastartup.com/israel-lidera-startups-globales-que-puede-aprender-latam/#: ~:text=Israel%20has%20the%20highest%20concentration,public%20sector%20employees%20working%20in%20synergy. Accessed December 15, 2025. ↩︎
- Manpower, January 31, 2025. Available at https://blog.manpowergroup.com.mx/manpowergroup/escasez-talento-2025-mx ↩︎
- Cited in “IQ is declining for the first time in decades,” in National Geographic Spain, April 11, 2023. Available at https://www.nationalgeographic.com.es/ciencia/cociente-intelectual-esta-descendiendo-por-primera-vez-decadas_19756 . “While the idea that IQ is increasing with each new generation is very appealing, scientists have estimated since 2007 that IQ could reach a period of stagnation starting in 2024,” cited in https://www.dw.com/es/nos-estamos-volviendo-tontos-el-iq-se-estanca-segun-estudio/a-65292252 ↩︎
- A comprehensive explanation can be found at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4152423/ ↩︎
- Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions Final Report, November 6, 2025, available at: https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/11/12/uc-san-diego-incoming-students-cant-do-basic-math-n3808826 Accessed November 13, 2025. ↩︎
- Cuchillo. Meditaciones tras un intento de asesinato, Barcelona, Random House, 2024, pp. 199-200. ↩︎
- David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, Xiaowei Xu, “The declining mental health of the young and the global disappearance of the unhappiness hump shape in age,” in Plos One, August 27, 2025. Available at: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0327858&utm_source=pr&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=plos006 . Accessed December 26, 2025. ↩︎
- See: https://elpais.com/salud-y-bienestar/2025-08-27/la-crisis-de-los-20-es-la-nueva-crisis-de-los-40-los-problemas-de-los-jovenes-pulverizan-la-curva-de-la-infelicidad.html ↩︎
- Zenit Agency, October 31, 2025. At https://es.zenit.org/2025/10/31/informe-muestra-que-los-jovenes-estadounidenses-van-mas-a-servicios-religiosos-que-sus-padres/ . Accessed February 8, 2026. ↩︎
- [1]“Gen Z is protesting corruption worldwide. Will they drive lasting change?”, January 27, 2026. At https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/advocacy-social-movements/gen-z-protesting-corruption-worldwide-will ↩︎
See Daniel Waldenström’s book, Richer and More Equal: A New History of Wealth in the West, Madrid, Deusto, 2026, 296 pp.↩︎
Further Reading: