The main problem, perhaps, is the slow speed of educational evolution compared with the rapid restructuring changes in industry and business.
If you keep educating people for jobs that will no longer be available when they graduate, then you reinforce future unemployment. That is why a high-level general liberal education that equips kids as problem solvers and entrepreneurs is better than training them for specific tasks.
Of course, any country makes statistical anlayses of the future demand for particular skills and tries to ensure that these need are satisfied. Such as having enough doctors etc. But these key professions in the welfare of a society are a small percentage of the total number of jobs.
If I were in government I would fight to have teachers among the highest paid, not the lowest. By attracting the very best to teaching, the long term problems of a society can be better addressed.
Short-term problems are of course what obsess politicians. You can't be me, I'm taken
It is clear, as an example that you are correct, that the IT industry is going through the same evolution as the car industry did, from craft to industrial process. But it is happening faster, and education is not keeping up.
However, I cannot yet find figures, but it seems the computer industry is undergoing the same transformations as the car industry, only, it never employed so many people in the first place.
Biotech will employ even less in the first place before efficiency and productivity destroy it as anything more than a niche employement.
High level education as problem solvers is a positive thing, but the real problem is that we can now solve problems with less labour.
In the ideal world this would allow us to solve more problems, but the seed capital seems to me to be the big obstacle.
Kaos Pilot business school in Aarhus, Denmark (with which I am peripherally involved) is a good example of this.
www.kaospilot.dk
From surveys of other European Business Schools, much less then half of graduates expect to run their own business within 5 years. At Kaos Pilot, the majority expect to do so.
Sadly in Finland it is not easy to start your own business - dealing with bureaucracy only starts to become efficient when staff levels reach over 50 or so, and one can acquire the specialist skills to deal with all the form filling, analysis and changing regulations. Nevertheless, of the 230,000 odd businesses in Finland, over 70% employ 10 people or less. You can't be me, I'm taken
