Educating Youth for Future Unemployment in Greece

Written by Radha Jagannathan and Ioanna Tsoulou, this chapter begins with a discussion of the economic turmoil Greece has experienced in recent history and takes us through the debt crisis, the austerity measures that followed, and the cash-for-reform deal with the EU. Focusing principally on the supply side and on the Greek society’s tendency for over-educating its young, the chapter describes the rise of the precariat as a direct consequence of the labor market’s inability to absorb the high-educated/high skilled labor, and focuses attention on the prevailing norms of clientelism, nepotism and non-meritocracy that have earned Greece a rather dubious distinction as one of the most corrupt western democracies. After an overview of the Greek education system and the rather poor reputation of its VET, the chapter provides a comparative discussion of the active labor market policies in Greece and Portugal and why similar reforms in the two countries led to divergent results. The chapter explores Greece’s capacity to adopt an entrepreneurship pathway to curbing youth unemployment and presents results from a survey of 30 Greek youth who opined on the issues of youth labor market.