On Succeeding in Life, or Not

Students chart zigzag routes, study finds

The two paragraphs that I found most interesting in this article are these:

"The downside of the findings, Prof. Finnie said, is that the numbers show that many students are not content with the choices they make out of high school. (The Statscan numbers do not take into account enrolment patterns of mature students.)

Some switching is probably healthy, Prof. Finnie figures, but so much movement suggests that a portion of students are either turned off by their campus experience, don't have enough information going in, or are unprepared."

"The downside" is an interesting choice of words. I would not call this situation a downside so much as the inevitable push for students to know by sometime in grade 10 Exactly What They Will Do For The Rest Of Their Lives After University Which They Will Certainly Attend Or Fail And Die Alone In A Gutter Somewhere Forgotten By Everyone. Of course many students are not content with their choices that they make just after high school! What do you expect? I mean, really! We are taught that we have to go to university, and if we take a year off after high school we will never go back. I was told that countless times by numerous people in my final year of high school when I had decided to take a year off to make some money to afford to go to school. Aside from the fact that I would have gone back anyway, I half went back just to spite everyone who said I'd never do it.

If you are going to expect people to jump right in and never get to know what the real world is like, you can't expect them to stay in their first choice right out of high school. How many people stick to their first job? I'd bet that that percentage is lower than the figures given for students who don't change either programmes or schools.

That incessant belief that people have to be students to be really successful and that they should know what they want to do right out of high school is a huge problem. If we would accept that maybe, just maybe there are other options, and maybe not everyone who can be successful -- even a successful academic -- should go to university as soon as they finish high school, maybe we would have a far more successful and happier society. And maybe we wouldn't have so many people who are only in school because their parents are making them and they've been told that if they don't go to school they won't succeed in life.