Can't earn, won't learn

BEATING a retreat from boredom and heat, teenage mall rats have been infesting the nation's airconditioned shopping centres during the summer break.

One of them, a skinny blonde Paris Hilton wannabe parading a smirk and a T-shirt as tight as her skirt was short, caught my eye in Brisbane recently. "Too pretty to do homework," her T-shirt proclaimed.

This could well become the slogan for her generation of the noughties, in which celebrity trumps substance and beauty beats brainpower.

How else to explain the obsession with role models such as Hilton - famous just for being photographed - and professional teenage party animal Corey Delaney?

"Hey, honey," I yearned to heckle the too-pretty princess. "Wait'll ya hit 40!" But I didn't want to sound like a narky old gen-Xer.

In all seriousness, her slogan of superficiality, that good looks alone, rather than learning and hard work, will get you through life, is worrying.

One in eight Australian teenagers is dropping out of school before Year 12, without working or continuing to study.

That's an awful lot of bored mall rats. And it's a big pool of wasted talent and labour, a social sore in the making. Ongoing education or job training ought to be compulsory until adulthood: earn or learn, and preferably at the same time.

A university degree is an aspiration for most young Australians. But as last year's batch of Year 12 graduates starts receiving university offers this month, many will miss out on their dream of tertiary study. In Queensland alone, more than one-third of applicants will be rejected.

Yet uni is not for everyone. The nation needs plumbers and shop assistants, tilers and farmers as much as it does chartered accountants, marketing gurus and psychologists. As anyone who has ever renovated a house knows only too well, Australia has a crippling shortage of qualified, competent tradespeople.

Baby-boomer tradesmen on the cusp of retirement are increasingly reluctant, especially given today's faltering economy, to take on apprentices.

Those teenagers lucky enough to snare an apprenticeship do not always stick with it. Data from the National Centre for Vocational Educational Research reveals that nearly half the apprentices who start training quit or are sacked before they qualify. Low rates of pay while training and the lure of low-skilled jobs paying big bucks in the mines exacerbate the training drain.

Why do governments not pay employers more to recruit young trainees, by giving them all the taxpayer funding that would otherwise be spent on schooling, full-time TAFE courses, university or dole payments? Governments spend nearly $9000 a year to educate a high-school student. Yet employers receive just $4000 to take on an apprentice, then have to pay the trainee a wage while they work.

Already, the unemployment rate for 15 to 19-year-olds is 17 per cent, nearly four times the overall national rate of 4.5 per cent. Given that low-paid entry-level jobs often are the first to go in a recession, youth unemployment can only worsen over the next couple of years.

Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has described school drop-outs as the "long tail" dragging behind Australia's educational achievement, noting that our teenage unemployment rate is 10 times higher than Denmark's.

In a ranking of 35 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Australia is 23rd when it comes to the proportion of teens finishing Year 12 or a vocational Certificate III qualification (the equivalent of a trade certificate). We trail the US, New Zealand, Canada and Korea.

Only 71 per cent of 19-year-old Australians are finishing Year 12, generally regarded internationally as a basic level of education. The federal and state governments want to boost attendance to 90 per cent by 2020.

Yet for students from poor families, many of them Aboriginal and migrant, a mere 58 per cent are Year 12 graduates, and that includes the bright, motivated students.

This high drop-out rate is contributing to an underclass of undereducated, unemployable youth who will go on to propagate their poverty, despair and lack of ambition. An idle mind is the devil's playground.

Sure, formal study education is not always the answer. For every school student who is academically inclined, there is a classmate whose talents lie elsewhere. They might be gifted at drawing or playing a musical instrument; they could be clever at construction, fascinated with farming or diligent in doing trade work.

These young people ought to be encouraged to switch to vocational training or combine part-time work and study.

In its 2008 report How Young People are Faring, the Foundation for Young Australians reported a strong link between poverty and educational involvement. Naturally, in families where teenagers have little choice but to get out and earn a living, they are less likely to go on to university or TAFE. Nineteen-year-olds from the wealthiest backgrounds are twice as likely to continue studying than those from the poorest families.

Being too pretty to do homework is dumb. Being too poor is tragic.