MOBILITY THROUGH EDUCATION: THE IMPORTANCE OF MECHANISMS FOR DEFERRED GRATIFICATION In modern society, young people must demonstrate

a growing capacity for deferring gratification if they hope to efficiently exploit the existing channels of mobility. This is due to the fact that the thresholds for access to the necessary resources for achieving good occupational positions have risen sharply. The clearest example of this phenomenon is the education system. A recent studies shows that in Montevideo the minimum education level at which the majority of 20- to 30-year-old workers receive sufficient wages for maintaining a small family (a spouse and small child) above the poverty line is 17 years of schooling. (Similar measures for Montevideo in 1981 set the level at nine years of schooling, or the equivalent of finishing the basic secondary cycle.) Keeping a student in the education system for such a long period poses new problems for the social institutions associated with young people; the complexity of these problems varies according to the speed of educational expansion. Financially, the problem involves not only covering the students daily consumer expenses for a longer period and paying the expenses derived from increasing educational costs, but also compensating somehow for lost income in many cases. The nonfinancial requirements include the continuity and strength which these families must exhibit in order to transmit values and sustain motivation. Keep in mind that for adolescents to develop the capacity to defer the gratification of their immediate needs until after long-range educational goals have been achieved, they and their parents must all be convinced that the current sacrifices will be adequately compensated by future achievements. Source: Montevideo, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)/ ECLAC Office in Montevideo, May, 1999.

Another element worth considering is the greater degree of institutional and political articulation seen among the adult generations in comparison with the younger generations. In an environment of growing job insecurity, those segments of the population that act corporatively tend to close ranks around the defense of their achievements and in particular of their market positions. Such actions generate constraints that not only hinder the full utilization of the youth populations human resources but also prevent a higher State investment in developing their skills, with adverse effects for intergenerational equity. Although the problems of intergenerational equity have not been widely investigated in the countries of the region, they become evident on comparing the relative weight of the poor in the different age groups and the distribution of public social spending (especially with respect to the share of social security and education).