A lot of students have just received their intermediate and A’ Level results and are thinking about what careers to pursue and what sort of education to go for. A lot of parents are also thinking about the future of their children. But few in either group have very solid foundations on which they can rely on for this decision. The information about future prospects is sparse, a lot of it is just hearsay and oftentimes wrong, and so the decision-making happens under poor conditions. In this article I would like to point out some aspects that, I hope, will help in making these decisions.
Recently a young man started chatting to me at the gym about his career options and prospects. He had just gotten his results for the intermediate examinations and wanted some advice on what he should do at the next stage. I asked him what he wanted to do with his life and what were the options that he was considering. He said he wanted to either do a Bachelors in Commerce (B.Comm.) or a simple two year Bachelor of Arts from one of the colleges linked to the University of the Punjab. His basic ambition in life was to go into politics as he had a ‘family background’ in it, and thought being a member of the national or provincial legislatures would be a ‘cool’ thing and a lucrative enough career. I suggested that he could get a degree in law or an advanced degree in management before entering politics as this would give him some expertise as well as maturity. His reply was very revealing. He said he already knew more than enough about life and everything else in the world. All he needed was a ‘degree’ that would satisfy the legal requirement for being a graduate so that he can enter politics. Given this the only thing I could suggest was that then he could do any degree he wanted and all of them will serve the purpose. As we went out he was more or less convinced that the two year bachelors was his best bet as that would allow him entry into politics the quickest.
I narrate the incident as it is quite symptomatic of the general state of things. Students, and sometimes parents, do not know what to do, they do not have a good idea of what education is all about or should be about, but modern living and exposure to the internet and western media has given them the false impression that they do know what the world is all about.
Education definitely has a vocational element to it and since most students and parents find that to be the main purpose of education let us tackle this issue first. Education should prepare a student for making decent choices about careers and should help in getting expertise about particular vocations. A law degree that does not prepare a student for all that lawyers are supposed to do would be a poor law degree, and the same is true for other vocational degrees like medicine, engineering, management and so on. But one should be wary of two things. The decision for a vocation should not be based on just market fads alone as there are many options now open to students that were not there a couple of decades ago. And parents and students should be wary of reducing the value of education to its vocational aspect alone.
When we were growing up everyone wanted to be either a doctor or an engineer. A little later everyone wanted an MBA, and then everyone wanted to be a computer expert and now even that is out so everyone tends to be more confused. But do we not need doctors, engineers, MBAs and computer experts now? Of course we do.
It is true that when a new profession opens up the returns to early entrants are high but this phenomena is very transitory and as soon as a large number of people enter that profession the returns come down towards the average (adjusting for differences in training and all that). This will keep happening as human ingenuity will keep creating new fields, new demands and new ways of doing things and so there will always be need for people in these new professions. If one is lucky enough to predict such a wave one could benefit greatly by riding it through. But clearly only a few can be early entrants, and for most the choice of vocation has to be based on other criteria.
Two very simple yet very important criteria for choosing a career are aptitude and interest. If you like something and are fairly good at it, that is what you should go for. If you can find something to do that you like and people are willing to pay you for doing it, what can be better. You will not consider that to be work and so, in a way, you will never have to ‘work’ in your life.
Similarly if there is something that you are fairly good at, that might be the career for you. Again your interest and aptitude make it an obvious choice for a career. The problem arises if you are interested in one thing but good at another. Then there is a problem and the choice is much harder. Personally I would go for interest more than aptitude in such cases, but this is a personal choice.
In choosing a career one should not be swayed unduly by ‘fads’ and what current returns are in a profession. All professions go through highs and lows. At the same time we also know that we will always need doctors, engineers, teachers, and so on. So the question is more whether you can make your space in the profession you choose, whether you are good at what you do and have a passion for it rather than what the returns are. Returns for exceptional workers, whatever the vocation, tend to be high. One of my cousin’s son had gotten a $100,000 plus job in the US as soon as he finished his bachelor’s degree from a Pakistani university a few years ago. Some of the elders in the family had chided me on my career choice of teaching then since I was not making a tenth of what this young man started making immediately after his bachelors even though I had a doctorate. Three years down the road this person has been unemployed now for a number of years and has been thinking of going back to school for more advanced work, while the tortoise of my career has been holding steady. Of course this is not to say that this sort of thing is bound to happen. I am sure my relative is going to have a wonderful future and career, but what I wanted to bring out was just the arbitrary nature of fads and the futility of making career choices based on them.
There is a larger issue involved here too. Education, especially at the bachelors level, has another purpose to it as well. Education is supposed to make the individual more literate, more aware, more reflective and able to acquire more depth as a person and as a citizen in a society. Education has a social function as well. It should make the individual a better citizen as well. In most countries the bachelors level is supposed to achieve that. Undergraduate degrees are not supposed to be overly vocational. They are supposed to help the students in becoming a more complete and well-formed person and citizen. They are supposed to develop the individual so that he/she can think on their own and can stand on their own feet.
In most education systems this is achieved by making students go through a core curriculum that is taken from a number of areas so that the holistic approach can help develop the overall personality. Students are asked to take courses in the humanities (literature, philosophy, religious thought, art and so on), in social sciences (economics, politics, sociology, psychology), pure sciences as well as mathematics. This helps in better career choices later as well, but the main benefit is that this introduction allows students to connect with what humans have thought about in the past, what they have discovered, what they have found to be worth preserving, and thus this gives us the ability to make students into better human beings.
Few universities in Pakistan offer this sort of curriculum. There are schools that offer good vocational training (the medical schools, most of the engineering schools and some of the newer universities for management and IT education), and students should not have trouble getting decent vocational training in these institutions, but it is the more general training and education that is missing from most schools. Parents have to get into the habit of demanding this education at the bachelors level. Otherwise we will continue to get young people who will believe that they know everything after their intermediate.
The Delphi was right: Socrates was indeed a wise man. At least he knew that he knew little. Most of our students think they know it all when they know almost nothing. The reasons for this are clear. We look at education as vocational training only, and we are only looking for good career fads. We do not look at it as a necessary tool for being a better human being and citizen and we do not look at it as a way of finding one’s calling. This has to change. If we do change it then only will our choices make more sense and the world will indeed be our youths to explore.
This article was originally published in The Nation.
