Educational institutions should actively encourage their students to choose fields of study that will prepare them for lucrative careers.Write a response in which you discuss your views on the policy and explain your reasoning for the position you take. I

There are moments in life we are required to make a decision with too great an impact to do it alone. Thus, in order to make such decisions, we often seek the counsel of others, such as our family, our close friends, or an expert in a relevant field. One such decision is choosing a career. Regardless what country one is from or which social group he or she belongs to, everyone has to decide on a path to follow in life. More often than not, we are called to make our first career decisions during our adolescence or young adulthood. Consequently, one of the most important groups that can help with this decision is the educational institution we are attending at the time. The term ‘educational institution’ might apply either to a high school or a university, or even a school that specializes in a specific field of expertise, such as a sports organization or a music conservatory. Some people propose that such institutions should be actively involved in their students’ decisions and influence them in favor of career paths that can bring more success and money along the way; others disagree. Assuredly, such a policy could possibly lead to students making decisions that can land them a decent job with an appreciable income. However, this would reveal a narrow outlook in defining success; it would be easy to argue that job satisfaction is much more important than financial success. Furthermore, such policies would definitely overlook the possibility of driven students succeeding against the odds. Therefore, schools should help students evaluate their alternative career options and provide them with enough information on how to achieve them, but should not influence them towards any direction.

The first thing to keep in mind while evaluating such a policy would be that success itself is especially difficult to predict. While there is a glut of statistics and analyses on what careers are more likely to provide job opportunities or higher incomes, there is no actual predictor on how successful a specific person would be in a specific career path. A popular example from history would be that of Walt Disney, a cartoonist that created from scratch one of the greatest and wealthiest business empires of our times. The career of cartoonist was no more lucrative back in the 1910s than it is today. In the world of the second Industrial Revolution, drawing cartoons for newspapers was never meant to be a full-time job. Disney himself did not show particular promise, and, at the age of 20, everyone would have easily branded him as a failure. He failed blatantly in his first ventures, and was even fired by his newspaper editor, who claimed he lacked talent and imagination. But Disney did not give up on his dreams, and his breakthrough came after a decade of hard work and perseverance, with his creation and popularization of Mickey Mouse. If there was a policy that discouraged Disney from pursuing a career as a cartoonist just because it was financially unpromising, Disney might have never achieved tantamount success in any other field. Not every cartoonist became as successful as Disney; but, specifically for Disney, no one would be able to predict success, and no one should have to.

But even if there was some formula that could reliably predict success, we would still be unable to account for all the different possibilities that may appear along the way. It is easy to fall into the trap of reviewing only some of the many opportunities a career path can lead to. An implementation of the policy in question might deem some careers as non-lucrative based on a limited evaluation of its outlook. For instance, when TV star and executive Lucille Ball was attending the John Murray Anderson School for Dramatic Arts in New York, her instructors actively discouraged her from pursuing her dream to be an Hollywood actress. It was a very competitive field, where most dreamers just remained unemployed and gave up after a while, and they believed she had neither the looks nor the talent to become one of the few genuinely successful actors of their time. They were, in fact, right; Ball never made it into Hollywood. However, another opportunity neither she or her instructors had considered appeared in the emergent and increasingly popular world of television, and she immediately grasped it. Nowadays, everyone remembers Lucille Ball as the star and producer of her immensely popular “Lucy” sitcoms, the nominee of thirteen and winner of four Emmys, as well as the first woman to run a television studio, producing a series of shows such as “Star Trek” and “Mission Impossible.” The example of Lucille Ball reveals that there are many lucrative options a career can lead to that are not obvious or available from the start. As a result, it is not feasible to decide whether a career path is promising or not beforehand; success might be hiding just around the corner.

Interestingly enough, there is one seemingly legitimate argument in favor of such a policy. Some might argue that, by encouraging their students to pursue profitable jobs, schools will be able to protect them from possible disappointments due to failure later in life. It is a noble notion; yet are they right? Is an appreciable income all that matters? History is full of people who pursued unpromising careers, but, unlike the aforementioned Disney and Ball, they failed in fulfilling their dreams. This does not mean they were disappointed or viewed their experiences as failures. Take, for example, the case of Michael Edwards, also known as “Eddie the Eagle,” who represented Britain in the 1988 Winter Olympics despite his personal records being too low according to the Olympic standards. Edwards wanted to succeed as a professional skier, but, having failed in downhill skiing, he decided to compete in ski jumping. Having been the sole candidate for Britain, he secured a place at the 1988 Olympics. Did he succeed? No, in fact, he failed spectacularly. He finished last, gathering less than half of the second-last competitor, and his frustrating performance resulted in alterations in the entry requirements in order to preclude such cases in the future. Edwards himself tried but failed to qualify in 1992, 1994 and 1998. However, his struggle became one of the most inspiring stories in the history of sports, and it was something that he reportedly never regretted. It might have not led to financial stability, but Edwards felt like that he fulfilled his dream and this was what it mattered most to him. The discussed policy overlooks the fact that people often desire more than financial success; genuine satisfaction and self-fulfillment is something that no educational institution would be able to assess, and this is why a student should base his decision on his own desires.

All in all, the discussed policy, which would see educational institutions actively urging students to follow lucrative career paths, would require that the school would be able to predict a specific student’s success. As generic information and statistics are hardly reliable, predicting a specific student’s success would be impossible, because every person follows a unique path in life and encounters entirely different challenges. There are always unforeseeable factors and opportunities that one cannot know beforehand. This does not mean that schools should not help students with their career decisions in any way; they should provide them with the necessary resources in order to make a decision as informed and prudent as possible. But, when it comes to actively determine which path to follow, students should make the decision themselves.