Many Students Choose Post-Secondary Programs That Don’t Fit

It’s easy to select an inappropriate program if you’re choosing in the dark.

For the first 25 years of my professional life, I spent much of my time meeting with university students to explore their academic goals, career aspirations and performance in the classroom.  Most of them had come to post-secondary education after achieving great success in high school and entered university with the reasonable expectation that future results would mirror the past.

Sadly, far too often this was not the case.  Where students had been led to believe that they might drop a few percent points as they adjusted to new educational environments and ways to learn, they found their academic average declining precipitously, much to their chagrin and that of their families.  Many failed or were placed on academic probation.

In some cases, disappointing performance is understandable and even well earned.  Immaturity, lack of commitment, too much partying and not enough school work, and failure to develop effective strategies for managing large amounts of work independently lead to predictable underperformance.

Student success can also be undermined by an unwillingness or inability to take advantage of the resources available to help students address academic problems and the loss from a much valued support system and resulting loneliness and isolation.  Many students respond to such challenges but often too little and too late to overcome initial distress.

But for far too many students, the issues with which they grapple are much more fundamental.  They simply do not like the programs in which they are enrolled.  The way that learning takes place does not fit their learning styles.  Sitting alone in libraries for 8 hours a day doesn’t work for them and memorizing and reproducing large volumes of minutiae seems pointless.

Lots of students discover they simply aren’t interested in their courses or programs.  The chemistry course they loved in high school seems virtually unrelated to what is being introduced in Chemistry 101; they discover their enjoyment, and perhaps a lot of their success, had much to do with their instructors and the intimate quality of the instruction from which they benefited.

In my experience, the choice of academic programs and schools for post-secondary education is vital yet made by increasingly younger students, often guided by very limited information upon which to base their decisions.  Students pick in the dark and end up places they would never have gone if their choices had been grounded in reliable data and insights.

If you don’t know where you’re going and why, you’ll typically end up somewhere else, not just in school but in any area of endeavour.  Students who lack clear academic and career goals rely upon the only assistance available – media, family, friends and teachers.  And well intentioned as all these sources of guidance may be, they tend to trust conventional wisdom.

Science, math, information technology, biotechnology, business, engineering; how can you go wrong?  That’s where the opportunities lie.  That’s what our society values and you should as well.  Everyone knows this to be true.  It’s broadcast over the air waves, communicated in the classroom and trumpeted by parents and peers.  How can you resist?  Why would you want to?

But there is a very large problem with much conventional wisdom.  It simply ignores the uniqueness and needs of the individual student.  It relies upon what everyone takes for granted; it homogenizes and compresses at the expense of valuing what is special and particular.  And it can lead to some devastating outcomes for real people as they move forward with their learning.

Not everyone experiences poor outcomes when they enter post-secondary education without concrete goals and plans.  Intuition and life experience direct some students to science, business, engineering and health sciences in a reliable and trustworthy fashion and they do just fine.

But, for the vast majority of students, thoughtfully exploring their interests, strengths, values and accomplishments provides the firm foundation upon which educational achievement can confidently rest.  This may seem a tougher road to travel but it leads surely to a more secure destination, at much lower cost.