by Brooke Shea

Created on: January 30, 2009

Some people believe that every student needs to attend college, but that is not the case. There are numerous students who are not college material or who do not have any interest in attending a four year university. These students can attend a community college and take a nine month, one year, or a two year program and be able to make a very good living and have a career that is very satisfying. Many of those programs include: welding, medical assistant, licenced vocational nurse, plumbing, electrician, air conditioning and heating, just to name a few.

The need in our society for the previously mentioned careers is great, so why is there so much hype about pushing students into college who do not want to be there and who will not achieve the expected degree. Having taught high school and college students for nearly twenty years, I have seen some very miserable students who were trying to live up to their parents expectations about attending college and getting a college degree. I have also seen many who really enjoyed education and wanted to go on to graduate school. Each student should be allowed to decide just exactly what it is he or she desires to do and not be pressured to make a decision prior to his or her junior year in high school.

On the other hand, parents and teachers do need to encourage students to investigate various careers in order to find out if they have an interest in a certain career and so that they can find out just exactly what is required of them in order to go into that particular career. They also need to know how many positions in that career field are projected to be available when they are ready to enter the work world. For example, if a student wants to become an astronaut, he or she needs to know how many slots are likely to be available when he or she is ready to enter that program. If only twenty positions are projected to be available then the student needs to also prepare for a second field in case he or she is not selected for the astronaut program. And, the second field needs to be as far removed from the first as possible because if the astronaut field is narrowing then in all probability a closely connected field will also be narrowing.

These are some of the things that school counselors need to discuss with students during their sophomore and junior years particularly and review during the senior year as well. It is not fair to let our students graduate from high school with expectations of becoming a geologist and thinking that there will be numerous jobs available when he or she is ready to enter the field. They need to know ahead of time that some fields will close down or be nearly closed by the time they emerge from college.

Yes, definitely future careers of today's youth matter greatly, and we as parents and educators need to make sure that they are educated concerning what is and will in all likelihood be available to them when they graduate from college, technical school, or some other institution after high school.

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