It was in the Bloomberg Businessweek the other day (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-10/silicon-valley-interns-facebook-welcomes-high-school-recruits): Last November, Michael Sayman, an employee at Facebook, met with the founder, Mark Zuckerberg. “4 Snaps,”  a mobile game developed by Sayman had attracted 500,000 players in the month after its release. On his way to Florida, Michael’s mother had accompanied him as he is a 17-year-old high school student, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. The piece also talked about high monthly salaries for interns. So what is going on here? Why are companies head hunting high school students?

Before that, I have an example from Turkey as well. Don’t think this trend is unique to the US. We have our very own Saymans. And I think this is a trend to take seriously. The structure of the labor market has been changing, if you ask me. Turkey already has high school students far superior to its university graduates. Not all high school students have such qualifications, of course; I am talking about a small group of well-educated teens. Let God have mercy on those who graduate from regular Turkish state schools. As the Ministry of Education has lost its grip on the education system, only God can help them.

Early this year, when Radikal was still a print newspaper, I wrote a piece about my nephew Mert, entitled “High School Kids are Trading Bitcoins Online.” Relying on a strong computer system financed by his father, I wrote, Mert rents his computer out to foreign companies for their daily procedures. He searched online posts, wrote some code, and opened his computer to a company for accounting purposes. The data comes in and the deal is done, regardless of the location of the company. This way, companies save on computer hardware and software. Such is the world nowadays, I said. Do you remember? The recent piece in Bloomberg is like a sequel to  the story about Mert.

Mert is 16 now, interning at TEPAV. For a while now we have been working on a matrix that shows the distance between 950 districts in Turkey. My colleagues at TEPAV asked Mert to prepare the matrix. Mert left the room, came back in a few minutes and asked, “Am I supposed to fill in each and every cell of a 950x950 matrix?” “Yes, the Directorate of Highways does not provide the data. We know it’s difficult and grueling; but we need the matrix,” they replied. “All right then,” Mert said. He turned in the completed matrix the next day. He had written a code to compile distance data via Google Earth and voila! On the third day of his internship now, Mert is waiting for another task. Such is the new generation. Not all of them, of course; the well-educated ones. They raise our hopes.

Back to the issue, how should we read this trend? I recommend you start with imagining the childhoods of today’s children, who learned to use iPads before learning how to read and write. Nothing will be the same when they start high school. Today’s high school kids are more productive than today’s university graduates as they are more skilled with computers. Do you wonder how?

The world is in the middle of a transition in terms of skills sets. A recent study revealed that in two decades, 47 percent of the jobs today will be automated. This means, accounting, for instance, will soon become a profession as extinct as cotton fluffing, quilt making, or blacksmithing. Employers will no longer need anyone to keep their books. You won’t have to make a bank transfer to pay your bills; the amount will be deducted automatically out of your account. The same will, in fact does, apply to foreign trade transactions between normal countries. A large part of the jobs today will be done by a simple computer algorithm. Manual is out. Supermarkets in Ankara don’t need as much check-out staff they used to as self-checkout machines are spreading. This trend will spread to other cities soon. After highway tolls, parking lot tolls will be collected by computers. And this transition will take less than a decade or two, if you ask me.

I believe that Turkey’s national education system is incapable of training children with the skills required for this transition. The current system is based on the illusion that the most anti-social students who hide in their rooms studying make the most successful adults. The new era, however, belongs to those who are social, master social media, and best describe themselves in just three words. Current university recruits consider that to be “successful” has nothing to do with the skills required by our times. They are not good at math, for instance. They are not competent in English. They lack the skills to adapt to the new era.

That’s what you get when you sacrifice planning the future of the country for presidential elections. No worries, though. The defects of the education system won’t be visible until a decade, but the election is right around the corner.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 15.07.2014