be met, either by private investment or the welfare state. Their disposable income will fall, because the financialization of public services demands a clutch of new debt repayments that eat into salaries: student loan repayments will be higher, private health insurance costs will rise, pension top-up payments will be demanded. They will face higher interest rates on home loans for decades, due to the financial crash. They will be burdened with the social costs of looking after the ageing baby boomers, plus the economic costs of energy depletion and climate change.
For the older generation it’s easy to misunderstand the word ‘student’ or ‘graduate’: to my contemporaries, at college in the 1980s, it meant somebody engaged in a liberal, academic education, often with hours of free time to dream, protest, play in a rock band or do research. Today’s undergraduates have been tested every month of their lives, from kindergarten to high school. They are the measured inputs and outputs of a commercialized global higher education market worth $1.2 trillion a year—excluding the USA. Their free time is minimal: precarious part-time jobs are essential to their existence, so that they are a key part of the modern workforce. Plus they have become a vital asset for the financial system. In 2006, Citigroup alone made $220 million clear profit from its student loan book.2
When in 2010 I attended Warwick University’s prestigious Economics Conference, it was populated by young men and women dressed in box-fresh versions of ‘business attire’—hypersexual retakes on the cocktail dress, Mormon-sharp suits, neutral ties—worn amid the routine squalor of a university campus. They were trying to live the dream—but a glance at their Facebook pages told you it was just for show. This was the lifestyle they’d been sold.
These students were aspiring to be the ‘ideal workers’ of the global age. The sociologist Richard Sennett describes how, starting in high-tech industries, a particular type of employee has become valued by corporations: ‘Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary social conditions … a self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability [rather than actual skill], willing to abandon past experience.’3
For employers, Sennett writes, the ideal product of school and university is a person with weak institutional loyalty, low levels of informal trust and high levels of anxiety about their own competence, leading to a constant willingness to reinvent themselves in a changing labour market. To survive in this world of zero loyalty, people need high self-reliance, which comes with a considerable sense of individual entitlement and little aptitude for permanent bonding. Flexibility being more important than knowledge, they are valued for the ability to discard acquired skills and learn new ones.
However, Sennett observes, such workers also need ‘a thick network of social contacts’: their ideal habitat is the global city, at whose bars, coffee shops, Apple stores, dance clubs and speed-dating events they can meet lots of equally rootless people.
The revolts of 2010–11 have shown, quite simply, what this work-force looks like when it becomes collectively disillusioned, when it realizes that the whole offer of self-betterment has been withdrawn. In revolts sparked or led by educated youth—whether in Cairo or Madrid—a number of common traits can be observed.
First, that the quintessential venue for unrest is the global city, a megatropolis in which reside the three tribes of discontent—the youth, the slum-dwellers and the working class. The estates, the gated communities, the informal meeting spaces, the dead spaces between tower blocks just big enough to be blocked by a burning car, the pheromone- laden nightclubs—all combine to form a theatrical backdrop for the kind of revolts we’ve seen.
Second, members of this generation of ‘graduates with no future’ recognize one another as part of an international sub-class, with behaviours and aspirations that easily cross borders.
I saw the Egyptian revolutionary socialist Gigi Ibrahim (@GSquare86), an iconic figure in the 25 January revolution, speak to London students a few weeks after Mubarak fell. There was no noticeable difference between her clothes, language and culture and theirs. She didn’t mind that the meeting was small, that people came and went at random, depending on their other social commitments; she was not put off by their texting and tweeting during her speech.
The boom years of globalization created a mass, transnational culture of being young and educated; now there is a mass transnational culture of disillusionment. And it transmits easily. When activists like Ibrahim began to appear on TV in vox pops from Tahrir Square, youth all over the world—above all in America, where the ‘image’ of the Arab world has been about Islam, terrorism and the veil—simply said to themselves: ‘Heck, that kid is just like me.’
Soon the activists were making physical links across borders. I had interviewed British student protester Simon Hardy during the wave of college occupations in London and had seen him carrying a red flag emblazoned with the word ‘Revolution’ on the 9 December demo; I was astonished to find him tweeting from Tahrir Square on 2 February. He reported:
We’re quite near the front line where the pro-Mubarak forces are throwing sticks and stones at us. Around us people are breaking up paving stones with metal sticks to get ammunition. This is wrapped in carpet and taken to the front line to defend the square against the pro-Mubarak militias. Everyone here comes up to us as we walk past. They say how much they love freedom and hate Mubarak.4
In the twentieth century, revolutionaries would ride hanging from the undersides of railway carriages to make cross-border links like this. Today, information technology and cheap air travel makes them routine; shared global culture makes the message easy to convey.
But there is a third social impact of the ‘graduate with no future’: the sheer size of the student population means that it is a transmitter of unrest to a much wider section of the population than before. This applies both in the developed world and in the global south. Since 2000, the global participation rate in higher education has grown from 19 per cent to 26 per cent; in Europe and North America, a staggering 70 per cent now complete post-secondary education.5
In Britain, the Blair government’s policy of getting half of all school-leavers into higher education meant that, when it broke out, student discontent would penetrate into hundreds of thousands of family homes. While the middle-class student activists of 1968 thought of themselves as external ‘detonators’ of the working class, the students of 2010 were thoroughly embedded both in the workforce and in low-income communities.
At the same time, in the developed world at least, the ‘graduates with no future’ often live in close proximity to the urban poor. Many dwell in the hidden modern slum—a.k.a. the ‘student house’—where every room contains a bed, or in flats rented in the terraced streets and inner-city neighbourhoods where the unemployed and the ethnic minorities live. Once the housing and jobs markets collapsed, the student house became the young accountant house, the young lawyer, teacher and other struggling professional’s house.
At the dance clubs students frequent there’s always some urban poor youth: this is true even in smart American college towns. But in the mega-cities of youth culture—London, Paris, Los Angeles, New York—the cultural proximity is more organic. And in no-hope towns where the college is the only modern thing in the landscape, everyone rubs shoulders in the laundromat, the fast-food joint, the cramped carriages of late-night trains.
In North Africa, though many of the college students who led the revolutions were drawn from the elite, you find this same blurring of the edges between the educated youth and the poor.
The story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the street trader whose self-immolation on the morning of 17 January 2011 sparked the revolution in Tunisia, illustrates this well. He can’t get a job because, in a corrupt dictatorship, he lacks the right connections. He’s a street vendor earning $140 a month, but he’s using the money to put his sister through college.6
