College + Career Ready? Are We Giving The Right Advice?

BY: Betsy Peters

It seems like each spring the interwebs light up with opinions on how to approach college & career. Articles on which majors deliver the best ROI, how to find the best party schools, and why you should abandon college like Steve Jobs did, sprout up as regularly as the daffodils in April.

Why the spike in April? Spring is commitment time. Students all over the country are planting the seeds of their future selves by making big bets. Bets about how to invest their time, talent, and treasure in the upcoming months in order to make the biggest impact on their future goals.

The exciting thing about this year is that the dialog surrounding those bets is beginning to shift. We see it online, we hear it in conversations with counselors, parents, students and, yes…even with colleges.

It used to be that college and career were discussed through a lens of destination…”if you can get into insert-Ivy-here you are set for life”, “if you study engineering you’ll have a great career”, “if you can land a job on Wall St. you are on the fast track to a million.” Well intentioned advice like this has routed impressionable students on paths to distant and mythical “destinations” like these for as long as we can remember.

But, things are changing. We all feel it. 

Slowly but surely the conversations about post high school paths are changing. They are deepening. Students are spending more time weighing their options. As all of the content in the world can be Googled, families are beginning to examine how college fits into the reality of a larger life-long curriculum. Degrees are only one part of the journey, no longer the primary destination. 

Dare I say it? It feels like we are on the cusp of becoming better consumers of higher education in the US.

This is thrilling to me. At PossibilityU, we encourage students to look at life after high school as an evolving syllabus – one that they have the power to create. We are proponents of what the man in charge of hiring 100 people a day at Google calls an “explict and willful” approach to investing in education. Now is the time to take a conscious approach to investing in education – one that demands much in return. 

We need an optics upgrade in college advice 

The pursuit of education is an exchange of energies that starts and ends with the invididual. We engage in learning to improve in one or more of the following areas: what we know, who we know, and how these can help us create a more meaningful and enjoyable life (for the parents scoring at home, the how is indeed about the money, but it is also bigger than that). 

Some high school students have the opportunity to jump straight into income generating opportunities that will improve all three areas of their lives. Most will opt to pursue two or more years of higher education, and based on their options…rightly so. 

But, here is where the optics upgrade needs to come in. In order for the investment of energies (time, talent and treasure) in pursuit of learning to yield a meaningful outcome, on either path, students must: 

• Engage with their subject matter deeply enough to demonstrate learning.
• Navigate the rules and regulations of their path despite the obstacles. (On the higher education path there will be credit, major and degree requirements, scheduling hassles, inaccessible professors, arcane assessments, and perhaps taking on debt to finance the degree, among others. On the career path there will be challenging clients or bosses, boring and menial tasks, risks taken without reward, and perhaps the need to go back and get more education at some point, etc.)
• Show how they apply their learning to solve problems in a way that frames their unique strengths.
• Have a working definition of what a meaningful and enjoyable life means to them. 

How are you shifting the conversation? 

If you are in conversations with students and families about college & career optoins, how can you help with the “meta” problems that face them? 

How can you go beyond the tactical to help students adopt a conscious approach to their future investment in education?

PossibilityU’s role is to give students and families the tools and training they need to find the colleges in their sweet spot – where what they want, what they are willing to invest and where they can get in overlap. The clarity that comes from defining and locating those opportunities simplifies the college admission process and puts students in control of their next investment in learning. But more on that in a few weeks… 

– Betsy Peters runs a company called Possibility U. It is a resource for students, teachers and school counselors to help navigate the tough decisions around college and career.