More Educated, Less Certain

One of the most powerful promises made to young people in the last century was simple.

Get educated and your life will become more secure.

It was never universally true.

Race, class, gender, geography and luck have always shaped what education could deliver.

But as a social bargain, it was powerful enough that families across the world reorganised themselves around it.

Stay in school.

Finish secondary education.

Go to university if you can.

Acquire the credential.

Move upward.

That belief produced enormous progress.

More young people are staying in education.

Professional worlds once accessible to narrow elites have opened to millions more people.

Education continues to matter.

But the bargain feels less predictable.

The ILO's global youth employment research captures the contradiction sharply. In low-income countries in 2023, unemployment among 15-to-29-year-olds with advanced education averaged 21 per cent, compared with 5.8 per cent among those with basic education. In lower-middle-income countries, unemployment among the advanced-education group was nearly double the rate among the basic-education group.¹

This does not mean educated young people are worse off.

The same ILO report finds that, in low- and middle-income countries, tertiary education still brings important advantages in job quality, including lower rates of informal and low-paid work.

The problem is different.

Education has expanded faster than many economies have created the high-skilled jobs graduates expect it to lead to.¹

In richer countries, the anxiety can take another form.

A degree may still offer substantial long-term benefits while no longer guaranteeing the kind of immediate stability students imagined when taking on the time and, in some systems, debt required to obtain it. The ILO also documents rising overeducation in parts of the labour market, where young adults hold qualifications above those typically required for their work.²

This produces a strange psychological problem.

A person can have made every conventionally responsible choice and still feel behind.

They studied.

They qualified.

They worked.

Yet the house, savings, secure contract or predictable career progression associated with "doing well" can remain distant.

The response is often to tell young people to become even more employable.

Add a credential.

Learn another tool.

Complete a certificate.

Build a personal brand.

Acquire AI skills.

Network.

The résumé grows while certainty does not.

There is an irony here.

The more uncertain the labour market becomes, the more responsibility we place on the individual to keep optimising themselves for it.

That pressure appears in surveys of young workers.

Deloitte's 2026 global Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that only 25 per cent of Gen Z respondents preferred fast-paced career progression defined by rapid promotion. Forty-four per cent preferred steady growth, while 21 per cent were willing to make lateral moves or even take a step back to gain useful experience. At the same time, 76 per cent still expressed interest in senior leadership at some point in their career.³

That is hard to describe as a generation becoming less ambitious.

Another interpretation is that the definition of progress is changing under different conditions.

Young people may be asking a perfectly reasonable question.

What exactly are they climbing toward?

The corporate ladder made intuitive sense when employment relationships lasted longer and each rung delivered a relatively comprehensible increase in security, authority and income.

A world of restructurings, contract work, automation, portfolio careers and rapidly changing skill requirements makes the ladder look more like a climbing wall.

Progress can be sideways.

You can move up, discover the skill you built is suddenly less valuable, move across industries, retrain and begin climbing again.

This is not necessarily worse.

Some people gain far more freedom from flexible careers than they would have had inside the rigid organisations of the past.

New industries create opportunities quickly.

Remote work has opened geographical possibilities for some workers.

Young people can build businesses, audiences and professional reputations without waiting for institutional permission.

The mistake is treating new possibility as equivalent to new security.

They are different things.

That distinction also explains why discussions about young people's attitudes toward work can become so moralistic.

Employers complain about loyalty.

Young workers complain about exploitation.

Older workers recall staying in jobs for years.

Younger workers leave.

But loyalty is not simply a personality trait.

It is a relationship between expectations.

If an employer reserves the right to restructure whenever economic conditions change, a young employee may rationally reserve the right to leave whenever a better opportunity appears.

The old bargain was partly relational.

The emerging bargain is increasingly transactional.

Perhaps the real issue is not that young people expect too much from work.

It may be that work is expected to provide too many things because other forms of security have weakened.

Income.

Health insurance in some countries.

Identity.

Friendship.

Purpose.

Learning.

Status.

Community.

A path to housing.

A path to family formation.

No job can reliably carry all of that.

UNFPA's 2026 survey gives us a glimpse of what young adults say they actually want. Financial security was considered important by 81 per cent for entering a partnership and by 88 per cent for parenthood. Stable employment mattered to 87 per cent when considering parenthood.⁴

These are not people rejecting conventional adulthood.

Many are waiting to feel capable of sustaining it.

Perhaps that is why the promise of education needs updating.

Education cannot honestly guarantee a stable destination.

But it can do something more useful than endlessly feeding people into a credential race.

It can give someone enough knowledge to understand the world, enough competence to contribute to it, enough flexibility to change direction and enough confidence to remain a learner after formal schooling ends.

That is a less comforting promise.

It does not say:

"Do this and everything will work out."

It says:

"The world may keep changing. We will help you become someone who can continue changing with it."

For a more uncertain century, that may be the more honest bargain.