8 Out of 10 Young People Say They "Do Not Know the Government's Announced 'Youth Policy Plan' in Detail"

Young People Call for "Relaxed Eligibility Requirements"... Need for Sophisticated Policy Design
"We Must Prevent the Information Gap from Solidifying into a Gap in Who Benefits"

It has been found that the majority of young people, who are supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the government's "Second Basic Plan for Youth Policy (2026–2030)," which will be fully implemented starting this year, still do not recognize the detailed contents of the policy.

According to a survey conducted by the youth policy platform "Yeolgodakgi" on 521 young people from January 16 to 31, only 15.5% of respondents answered that they "know the Basic Plan for Youth Policy in detail." In contrast, 84.5% of respondents said they had "only heard of it or do not know it at all," indicating that awareness of the policy is remarkably low.

In particular, there was a clear "information gap" depending on income level. Among low-income youth with an annual income of less than 24 million won, only 7.1% were fully aware of the policy details, whereas 33.3% of high-income youth earning 100 million won or more were fully aware, showing a gap of about 4.7 times. This suggests that differences in access to information can directly lead to imbalances in who actually benefits from the policy.

The most pressing difficulty felt by young people was "immediate survival issues." Over the past year, the areas that felt most burdensome were job and career insecurity (32.6%), housing costs (20.5%), and living expenses (14.6%), and these three items together accounted for 67.7%. However, the nature of the crisis differed by income level. For low-income youth, "job insecurity (51.1%)" was overwhelmingly the top concern, while for high-income youth (70 million won or more), "mental health and burnout (29.4%)" ranked first, showing that the nature of hardship changes across income brackets.

Regarding how much they feel the policy in their daily lives, more than half of the respondents (50.5%) said that they are either not eligible for the policy or are unsure whether they are eligible. As for policy improvement tasks, "relaxing eligibility requirements (37.2%)" was 2.6 times higher than "expanding the scale of support (14.0%)." This shows that, rather than simply increasing the budget, it is urgent to adjust the eligibility criteria to reflect reality so that young people whose income is near the cutoff line are not excluded.

The most preferred policies among young people were asset-building support (43.4%), job search promotion allowances (40.1%), and monthly rent support for youth (30.1%), in that order.

To move away from the current application-based administrative structure, Yeolgodakgi proposed innovations to the delivery system, including: introducing a tapered support model by income bracket, simplifying documents and procedures, and providing personalized push-type notification services.

In addition, given the stark regional and life-cycle differences, such as the heavy housing cost burden on youth in the Seoul metropolitan area and the lack of infrastructure for youth in non-metropolitan regions, Yeolgodakgi stressed that the next five-year policy should shift from a single package fixated on the "average" to a "precisely tailored design."

Won Gyuhui, CEO of Yeolgodakgi, said, "In policy, the process of reaching the actual beneficiaries is just as crucial as the sophistication of the design," adding, "Only if we move away from supplier-centered announcement methods and simultaneously innovate the delivery system so that it directly reaches young people's lives can we prevent the information gap from becoming a fixed gap in who benefits."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.