Degrees without jobs: the economics behind the student protests

TALAS — The marches that filled the government district this month began over a licensing surcharge on startups and couriers. It is worth asking why so many of the marchers were graduates, or about to become graduates, and why a fee on delivery bicycles touched them so closely.

Unemployment in the ISEZ is not reliably measured, which is itself part of the problem. But anyone who teaches at Talas State University knows where our graduates go. Foreign companies and the bases hire English speakers, which favors young urban Iradis, but those jobs are few. The public sector is full. Nurzhan's oil and industrial sector still recruits mainly among the Russian-speaking generation. What is left is the work young people make for themselves: delivery, small software firms, translation, online trade. The surcharge fell on exactly that.

A levy on the one part of the economy that absorbs underemployed graduates is a tax on a safety valve. The authorities have said the surcharge is a lawful licensing measure, and so it may be. The question is whether it is a wise one. Suspending it and opening the licensing rules for small firms to public consultation would cost the city little revenue and would show the students that someone in the administration has done the arithmetic they did.