Embrace our youth or embrace social decay

THE EDITOR: I am painfully aware of the decision many of our young people must make after graduating from university. Let us examine the reality facing them.

After having completed five to six years of study and the personal joy and contentment associated with graduation, they embark on living their dream life. A great job, looking for a house, buying a car, weekends on the beach with friends, trips abroad and the joy of island living.

The reality is that the best job for our graduates pays between $6,000-$15,000 a month. The average car payment is about $3,000, rent around $5,000, a decent mortgage if one can get a down payment from parents is about $10,000, cable and internet another $1,000, food another $3,000 and entertainment another $1,000. I deliberately left out the purchase of a cell phone as that can be a one-time payment – and for the plan one can add another $500 month.

Faced with that reality many graduates live with their parents and those with the opportunity to migrate do so.

It is a great disservice to our children and parents to endure years of study, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to graduate and then face an employment market that cannot allow them to repay their parents’ loan, to live independent of their parents or to have the choice of staying at home even though the opportunity to live abroad exists.

The salaries for graduates in TT are on average 25 per cent of the international market prices. Consequently, we are losing our best minds. There is an international dearth of skilled personnel and graduates. I personally know a few young doctors that preferred to repay their student scholarship awards than stay in TT and work for a salary that offers very little hope for a great future.

Every month we are losing our nurses, our doctors, our accountants, our IT technicians, our engineers, our managers, our lawyers and our many talented youths to Europe, Canada and the US.

The result is a declining middle class. It is impossible for any country to make notable progress without a strong educated middle class. TT is a young country and we need our youth to not only maintain our infrastructure but build new roads and buildings. We need our teachers, nurses and professionals to put our nation on a sound economic footing. We need innovative and inspired leadership. That kind of leadership is present in our young people.

Sadly, we ignore their challenges, we blindly continue along a path of social decay and somehow hope that more oil and gas would rescue our nation. Even the talented and educated Venezuelans that sought refuge here are leaving as we never maximised the great opportunity to embrace low-cost educated talent. Unless we change our approach to our youths and their development, we face a very perilous future.

STEVE ALVAREZ

via e-mail