What To Consider if You're Considering University — Knowing Your Options

By Bill Morrison and Ken S. Coates

Going to university used to be a passport to future success, but that’s no longer the case. For some students, it’s still a good choice that leads to a successful career after graduation, but for many their degrees are worthless pieces of paper. Choose the wrong program and graduation is more likely to lead to disillusionment and debt than a steady paycheque.

Yet parents, guidance counselors, and politicians still push higher education as if it’s the only option for building a secure future. In this book, Ken S. Coates and Bill Morrison set out to explore the many educational opportunities and career paths open to Canadian high-school students and those in their twenties. This book is designed to help young adults decide whether to pursue a degree, enrol for skills training, or investigate one of the many other options that are available.

In this special excerpt, we take the crucial action of pondering the right future for you, including such steps as 1. The Crossroads: Making Choices That Matter, 2. Know Yourself, 3. The University Option, 4. The College Option, and 5. Polytechnics. This book will help you consider all the options in a clear, rational way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jul 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781459730120

Book preview

Columbia

Introduction

So You’re Thinking of Going to University

STOP! Stop right now before reading any further. Ask yourself three crucial questions:

• Why?

• Why?

• Why?

If you are wondering why we ask this question three times, it’s because it is so vital for your future.

For those of you just finishing your secondary education, choosing your path after high school is one of the most important decisions you will ever make, perhaps the most important. It’s crazy to do it without giving it serious thought. It’s equally foolish to make it based solely on what other people want you to do, or think you should do. For better or worse, your decision will shape your future in dramatic ways. You need to think long and hard about it. That’s what we want to talk to you about.

Going to university can be a good choice. But it’s not a good choice for all high school graduates. For some, it can be disastrous — leading to debt, disillusionment, and failure. University is not the only good option open to you. Have you considered:

• Polytechnics?

• Community colleges?

• Starting a business?

• Working for a year or two?

• Travelling or volunteering?

• An apprenticeship?

If you’re listening to the general chatter — particularly from parents, guidance counsellors, and politicians — you may believe that university is your only option. It isn’t. For some of you, going to university will be a terrific choice that launches you on a path to happiness and prosperity. For others, it will be a totally wrong choice. Many students find out too late that they’ve made a bad decision, and end up back home by Christmas or the spring, poorer and sadder for the experience. Others will slog unhappily to the convocation finish line — only then to discover that they are ill prepared for the world of work.

Of course your parents are ambitious for you. They want you to get a job indoors in a comfy office. They don’t want you to end up working outside an office doing a job that involves physical labour — unless, of course, you are working on some environmental or similarly prestigious issue. And, let’s be honest, your parents also want you out of the house, preferably before you are thirty, with the money you need to launch into a good life.

For those of you who already have an undergraduate degree or who find yourselves feeling insecure about your current situation, you may be wondering what to do next. Perhaps the job you were dreaming of hasn’t materialized. You wanted to be a teacher, but there are so many unemployed teachers in their twenties that it’s impossible to find a teaching job. You are working in a Starbucks, not a high school. This wasn’t why you borrowed $30,000 and spent four to six years in university.

Should you return to university to get a different, or advanced, degree? Should you go to a polytechnic or a community college and qualify for working in a trade? Something must be done: you are on the good side of thirty (but not by much) and your parents are hinting that they’d like to downsize their house. The choices you made after high school have not worked out as you’d hoped. Obviously, you cannot un-make them, but you are young enough to make a new choice.

Regardless of how you came to be making this decision, now is the time to make smart, informed choices. This book will help you make the decision which best suits you; it also will help you prepare to meet the demands of today’s workforce.

An Uncertain Future

The future is as uncertain as it has been at any time in the last 150 years. People do not have a clue about what’s to come. Twenty years ago, the main things that now define your life — smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, sexting, on-demand videos, iTunes, and illegal downloads — simply did not exist. Twenty years from now, who knows? Right now, China is on track to become the world’s largest economy. The United States is on shaky ground. India is on the rise — and the Philippines and Vietnam may not be far behind. Europe, once solid and reliable, is torn by financial crises and social tension. You should see how limited the job prospects are for young adults in Europe these days!

In this unstable environment, how do you prepare for a successful future? The knowledge economy? Those who talk about it don’t really know if a university degree will give you a good career. That huge demand for skilled trades in the western resource economy? Don’t count on it lasting forever. The coming flood of retirements that will create hundreds of openings for young people? Not with middle-class jobs disappearing so fast. At least, the experts say, the service economy will remain strong — but will it?

We live at a time of constant and dramatic change. No one really knows what lies ahead — not us, not your parents or teachers, not politicians or governments, and not the college and university recruiters. Indeed, the only piece of wisdom about which we have absolute confidence is this: no one knows how the next ten to forty years will unfold.

And yet, here you stand — ready to make the choices that will determine your future. Before you leap into it, you have some tough decisions to make. If you are about to graduate, you need to determine how you will make your way into the confusing, high-stakes world of life after high school. Your parents and guidance counsellors urge you to go to college or university. If you live out west, you might be tempted by a well-paid, low-skill job in the resource sector. You may be planning to leave home. (Be honest: Doesn’t everyone want to be fully independent from their parents?) If you want to go to university, which one do you pick? And if you’ve already gone to university, did you make the right choice? Which program? Why not college? Are the polytechnics really different? How about an apprenticeship program? Or a year of travel or international work, or even volunteering? So many options, so many expensive choices, and so little guidance.

Preparing Yourself: How We can Help

This is where we come in. We want to help you make a careful choice about your future. Whatever you choose to do will have upsides and downsides. It costs a small fortune to go to university — and the money is poorly spent if you drop out after a year (or sooner) or if you cannot find a decent job after graduation. We have watched too many students make too many bad choices over the years. We want to help you figure out what is best for you — for now and for the future. Time spent thinking and planning your future may well be the best investment you ever make.

As we proceed here, we will try to maintain an avuncular[1] tone — we’ll keep it friendly and informal. We like universities and we like students. We wish both of them well, though we recognize that both have their faults. We also are fond of colleges and really keen about polytechnics, and we like well-planned travel, work, or volunteering. We offer ourselves as guides — two veteran university teachers who have been working with young adults for, well, a very long time.

Preparing for life after high school and university is a difficult and confusing task, for parents as much for the young adults heading off to advanced education or the world of work. We want to help. We have seen thousands of new students make their nervous way onto campuses. We have welcomed them to their first class at university, and have sat with them and their parents when their university dreams exploded in a welter of failed examinations, skipped classes, and poor essays. As parents ourselves, we have watched our children work their way through their studies. We know that there is nothing easy about what lies ahead. We have seen many students fail at university — and then succeed in life. We have watched young adults make foolish decisions that hounded them all their lives. We have seen people under-estimate the value of a college diploma and misunderstand the importance of work. We think we have some wisdom to share.

We should, however, confess: we are both old. One of us is moderately old; the other is really old. One of us got his BA in 1978 and other in (shudder) 1963. So, why should you listen to a couple of seniors? Let us ask you this: Do you want advice from some newcomer who just got out of college the day before yesterday, the ink on the diploma still damp, some dude who hasn’t got over his last beer bust? Or, would you rather listen to two guys who’ve been in and around universities in Canada and all over the world (first as students, and then as teachers and administrators) for a total of nearly ninety years? There’s not much we haven’t seen and done at universities — and here we are giving you the benefit of all this hard-won experience. Go ahead: listen to this newbie next door, or to a couple of veterans. Your life, your choice.

We don’t presume to tell you what to do, since the life trajectory of each family and every student is different. If you do choose to go to university, we can offer insights into how they operate, what typically happens to families and students in their first year, and how to get the most from a university career. But if you decide — as many of you should — to choose one of the various non-university options