Mexico City, December 11, 2023.- What is the future that young people want and how do they prepare for it? Generation Z shared their hopes, fears and dreams through Youth Talks, a project in synergy with Universidad Panamericana.
For this one, a collective consultation supported by artificial intelligence was carried out, which helped to know the opinion of more than 45,000 young people between 15 and 29 years of age from 212 countries and territories around the world.
The survey, which was conducted by the Swiss foundation Higher Education for Gooda non-profit organization, of which Universidad Panamericana is the strategic academic partner for Mexico and one of the three Latin American universities that participated in this project.
Training in values and virtues
When young people are asked what they want the future to be like, the answer is clear: their priority is peace. Mexican youth were no exception. In this group, peace is the main desire, followed by the desire to protect the environment and promote human values and virtues.
The results present a sample of the desires, fears, commitments and educational needs expressed by young people around the world. "For those of us who are dedicated to the education of youth, it is a pleasant surprise to see that almost a quarter of those surveyed ask that educational centers cultivate training in values and virtues," said Dr. Teresa Nicolás, director of Panamericana's Institutional Center for Educational Innovation.
He adds: "Young people are telling us that they want us to educate them to acquire the interpersonal values necessary for social relations: respect, solidarity and empathy".
Unmasking traditional surveys
For her part, Marine Hadengue, researcher and director of Youth Talks says: "Youth Talks breaks away from traditional surveys by adopting an innovative approach based on open-ended questions. Conventional methods, with their closed questions and predefined answers, fail to capture the nuances of our societies."
"Thanks to recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, it has been possible to harness the power of open-ended questions to avoid this pitfall. By analyzing more than one million diverse contributions, Youth Talks has been able to reveal a rich and varied picture of young people's opinions and aspirations, challenging stereotypes about youth," he says.
He also explained that the results of the consultation offer an accurate and nuanced view of the complexity of our societies, allowing us to identify the underlying tensions that hinder collective action.
Vision without filters
Additionally, the responses to the consultation show that young Mexicans want to understand how political bodies and systems work; so that they can collectively prepare for the future and become well-informed citizens.
"For the first time, we got an unfiltered view of young people's aspirations and fears, whatever their geographic or socioeconomic status. The open-ended questions encouraged honest and unbiased responses, allowing them to express themselves freely," notes Hadengue.
The Universidad PanamericanaTogether with Higher Education for Good is analyzing the views and requests of young Mexicans to present the results for Mexico and issue a series of recommendations to improve the country's education system.
To learn more about the survey go to https://youth-talks.org/.
