The issue with my story is that why was there even confusion in the first place? Why after twelve years of schooling was I still clueless about what career I wanted going into college? I mean I had eighteen years to figure out what job I wanted. Eighteen years to decide on the right career before I started paying for it. So I ask myself, why did I start a major that I had no intention of finishing?
I think the answer is simple, because as I said in Part 1, engineering is what I should do. I “should” become an engineer because it is extremely high in demand. I “should” become an engineer because it will pay very well. And I “should” do these things because they are safe, and safety is what helps the economy.
Our government wants its economy to flourish, like any government. With a better economy comes thriving businesses, less unemployment, and happier citizens. Therefore, the current system is pushing our educated youth in the direction of where the money is. We are currently in the middle of a technological revolution, so it would make sense that our government is pushing students towards STEM field jobs.
This is why I do not blame the government for their actions, I simply see an issue with the mindset it has created. The focus on certain subjects, and not others, has created a hierarchy within the educational system. Students who are intelligent in math are seen as geniuses, while students who are talented in the arts are seen as people with good hobbies. People do not deny that some students are good at art, but they instead deny the importance of art.
This branches much farther than just art and math. We see the hierarchy creating “hobby” subjects, like music, humanities, and soft sciences. These subjects, especially in high school, are valued as lesser than the other subjects, like math and science.
The best example I can think of this is when I was in eleventh-grade physics class. The student next to me was having trouble with the subject matter and turned to me for help. As we worked through the problem, I noticed a sketch he had drawn during the class period. The sketching was beautiful, I can still remember the twenty different shades he made with a single pencil. They came together to form a face with intricate eyes and an open mouth. I loved the drawing, and according to him, it took no effort at all. I was floored, I could not have drawn something half as good as that if I was given the whole school day. Yet here he was, drawing with minimal focus, as he listened to the lesson.
As I told him my amazement for his work, he gave me a confused look. He simply responded by saying how I was the genius because of my physics skills. From his perspective, his skills were insignificant, while mine were of the only significance. Sadly, there was little I could do to let him see otherwise. With every test we got back, I almost doubled his score. And each time he was reminded just how bad he was at physics, how bad he was at what “mattered”.
Now you can say that he only felt that way because we were in physics class and that if we were in an art class the tables would turn. The thing is, the tables never turned because they never had to. We were both required to take physics to graduate, but we were not required to take art. This difference in requirements makes for a huge amount of problems. If everyone had to take art, like physics, then my friend would have seen just how skilled he really was. Instead, he is lead to believe that he is bad at the important classes, the required ones, and average at the hobby classes, since only skilled people, like him, take those classes.
This hierarchy has to stop because of the millions of students who are misled into believing they are unintelligent every year, when they are in fact geniuses. They are simply not smart in the way they “should” be. This is why I propose an alternative to our current educational system. I believe that high school and middle school should have equal requirements across every subject. Rather than having three math requirements and one art requirement we should have an equal two each. Rather than having four history requirements and zero humanities requires we should again, have an equal two.
This equal number of requirements would allow students to truly be able to know what career they want to pursue in college. By forcing high school students to experience different branches of knowledge, rather than forcing them to only learn one branch, I would bet the number of students with a declared major would increase drastically. We would have an entire wave of future workers that know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. An entire generation of students that do not waste the few years of paid education taking a major they “should” take.
Now as fun as it is to see things in the ideal sense, we must remember that they are not always practical, but believe me when I say, this is logical in every way. So here are the numbers, roughly 35 percent of students go into college undeclared. Of the students that go into college with a major, about 75 percent of them switch their major at least once (Freedman, 2013). Now, if we assume that the average student has their major finalized by the beginning of their second year, which is probably an underestimate, this would imply that 83.75 percent of students will have wasted their first year of college-level education on a subject matter they have no intention of continuing.
One should also keep in mind that college, for the most part, is not free. Over 44 million Americans hold collective student debt that reaches 1.5 trillion dollars. This indicates that the average student loan borrower owes 37,172 when first graduating college (Hess, 2018). We just indicated that 83.75 percent of the average student’s first year is a financial waste. This means that about 314 billion dollars of student debt could have been avoided. The average student loan borrower would owe their college roughly $7,780 less right now!
So yes, our economy may suffer a little initially. We may not be the country with the most engineers, or the most computer scientists, but I would bet we would be hell of a lot happier. Students would become workers, and actually desire the transition. Workers would love their jobs, and actually want to make that daily commute.
People would be a lot happier because they would love their jobs and the knowledge they learned when preparing for it, not to mention the extra seven thousand dollars they would have in their pockets. With less debt, this country’s economy would improve, and with happier citizens would come more motivated workers. Of course, there is no guarantee, but I will guarantee that the job you “should” do is a lot better than the one you will do.
Work Cited
Freedman, L. (2013, June 28). The Pennsylvania State University Division of Undergraduate Studies. Retrieved August 10, 2018, from https://dus.psu.edu/mentor/2013/06/disconnect-choosing-major/
Hess, A. (2018, February 15). Here’s how much the average student loan borrower owes when they graduate. Retrieved August 10, 2018, from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/15/heres-how-much-the-average-student-loan-borrower-owes-when-they-graduate.html