Amy P sent me a link to an interesting post by Joanne Jacobs. Jacobs first links to an item at the Chronicle by Isaac Sweeney. Sweeney says that professors shouldn't tell students that their goals are unreachable, because the student doesn't have good grades or because there are few jobs in that profession.
The commenters disagreed. They said that students have incredibly unrealistic expectations of their future salaries. Some students think that they will make $100,000 as a starting salary after getting a 2 year degree. Many thought that they were going to become doctors, when the professor knew that they weren't even going to pass that class.
Unrealistic expectations must be contributing to sky rocketing student loan debt. I think we need more goal squashing.
Apt. 11d 
I get a remarkable number of students with GPAs hovering around 2.0 who talk confidently about law school. I do try some goal squashing, but often they don’t listen.
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Here’s one of the commenters from the Sweeney thread, a professor who is doing this right:
“When questioned about their expectations, individually and privately, they pretty much all said that their parents told them that if they went to college, they would make three or four times the money that the parents had done. So they took their middle aged parents salaries, multiplied by four, and assumed that would be their starting salary. That was the total extent of their research. And if my college has career counselors, they are awfully low key, because I don’t know about them, so I can’t refer the students to someone else.
“So I gave them a homework assignment to gather salary and benefit information about their expected field, find out about expected future openings, talk to people in the field about what people in that job actually do, gather information about apartment costs, how much their parents spend on groceries in order to estimate food costs, health insurance, car insurance, and so on in order to develop a future budget. They were horrified. I had girls in my office in tears, upset parents on the phone going on about destroying dreams, and faculty in some of those fields upset with me and worried about their future enrollment if students found out how low the salaries and expected job openings were.”
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I had a friend a bit like this, who was just extremely overconfident about everything. She had 10s of thousands in student loan and CC debt from a first failed attempt at college and then from living the high life. The thing is is that she actually was smart and capable and could work hard, but had such a high opinion of herself she never really applied herself, or she had unreasonable expectations of what the results would be when she did. She’s now in law school, and I wonder how that’s going.
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I have a young relative (a very sweet, idealistic young woman) who majored in the liberal arts, got so-so grades, decided she wanted to be a doctor and help people, didn’t get in anywhere stateside, went to an off-shore school, ran up $60+k in medical school debt and then decided about 2 or 3 years in that she wanted out of the program. (She’s since gone into a different branch of the public health field and is doing more or less OK.)
I’ve read a number of happy talk pieces about the merits of liberal arts majors going into medical school, but my young relative’s case has really soured me on that idea. Some of my take-aways from her story are:
1) If you want to go to medical school, you should love biology, chemistry, anatomy and long hours of studying them as much as hot fudge sundaes.
2. You can “help people” a lot better without having $60k in student loans hanging over your head.
3. There are lots of avenues for helping people, and you should choose the one most consistent with your actual abilities and inclinations.
4. If you don’t get into a US medical school, maybe it’s just not meant to be.
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I have a friend who was an administrator at a career center at a university and I’ll never forget the stories she told me about students who decide they want to be a doctor because they like Grey’s Anatomy, or a lawyer because they liked LA Law (and I’m sure it’s similar with cop shows, etc.)
She said that there is actually a correlation between the professions of the people in the highest rated TV show and which professional schools will have a spike in admissions applications each year. Sad, but true. . .
Because we all know that being a doctor is exactly like Grey’s Anatomy. (My sister is a nurse and and our dad’s a doctor and we always laugh when they show the people making out after working in the hospital all day, still in their clothes that smell like poop and vomit — so realistic!)
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Additions the list of “Should you go to med school?” (and not just if you’re a liberal arts major are
5. You have to be ok with the blood, poop, vomit, and people’s innards.
6. You have to be ok with people, talking to them, talking to them when they’re unhappy, obnoxious, mad, desperate, scared.
7. You have to walk away from the patient you can’t help, the baby who died, the mom who will never see her child again, the drug addict who is just going to try again and not have it creep into the rest of your life.
8. You have to be able make decisions, even though a mistake (or even the wrong perfectly reasonable answer) could cost someone their life.
9. Medicine is a service profession.
(and, a lot of people who love biology, chemistry, and math as much as hot fudge don’t qualify).
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My only question about this current train of thought about entitled college students is how new it is. I’m guessing that college students have always been like this, at least for a while. The only difference, say, in the 20’s, was that only a few people got to go to college, and those people had so many backstops or sure deals that they could count on their entitlement.
Part of the issue now is that the wider access means that kids think their entitled, but we’ve taken away all their entitlements.
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I’ve mentioned before my friend’s former OB, who she had to can after realizing that he seemed really bored with medicine. He perked up a lot when he had a chance to talk about his hobby farm (which is pretty impressive, actually). My friend was especially put off by his statement that he went into obstetrics because, “Nothing bad happens in obstetrics! It’s such a happy field!” I don’t even know where to begin critiquing that statement.
If he had to go into medicine, maybe dermatology or pathology would have been a better fit?
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I have an Aspie who’s good at math and science. She wants to be an anesthesiologist “so I won’t have to talk to anybody — cuz they’ll be asleep!”
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What a smart kid! (She does know that they’re not asleep to begin with, right?)
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I am curious about how much of these unrealistic expectations are because of “economic class jumping”. In other words, if you are the first person in your family to go to college, you won’t have had the discussions around the supper table growing up about the reality of various professions. You won’t be getting advice firsthand from family/friends about which school, which program, which classes, how to succeed. All those subtle points that are attached to economic/social class that you don’t learn in a book.
There have always been successful and unsuccessful [insert professional designations] but to someone who is new to that world, it might just seem like the streets are paved with gold.
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PS And also, it may be unclear how much of that success is due to the right contacts (again the benefits and privilege of certain social/economic class memberships) rather than just hard work and luck alone.
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“In other words, if you are the first person in your family to go to college, you won’t have had the discussions around the supper table growing up about the reality of various professions.”
I think even trying to enter professions that haven’t previously existed in your family can be problematic. My doctor wannabe relative grew up in a very well-off, but non-medical family. (Ever notice how many mature doctors have kids who are going into medicine, too?)
On the other hand, take somebody like my husband, both of whose parents have doctorates. I wouldn’t say that his two doctorates were easy (and they weren’t anything like what his parents studied), but I would say that it was a lot easier and more intuitive for him to go into academia than to go into retail trade or construction.
There is a lot to be said for mild nepotism, just because there’s so much know-how that is transmitted via family culture.
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Yeah, hands-down, the second generation academics in my grad program got better jobs. One of them was interviewed for her dream job by an academic who “just happened” to have also been her volleyball coach when she was growing up in nerdy college town.
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When my parents graduated from college (state schools, nothing fancy….) they both found jobs immediately, as did all their friends. There just weren’t that many graduates vying for positions that required a college degree. Wasn’t that true until the early 80s?
I’m sure that history feeds the lingering perception that college degree=golden ticket and even more so in non-degreed families. And of course, universities have a financial interest in perpetuating the myth.
It depresses me how many first-generation college graduates we hire for call center jobs (low paying and fairly dead-end). They have big loans (and many of them have children to support as well) but they don’t have the personal or professional skills to move up, despite the degree and enough brains to major angry callers and a number of complex systems. A generation ago these people could have made a decent wage in a factory or at the phone company; now that those jobs are gone, we keep hearing that they just need college educations. But at least for a sizable subset, it’s not leading to a middle-class existance, just a big loan payment.
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So – yes, please, squash those dreams with a dose of reality.
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“There just weren’t that many graduates vying for positions that required a college degree. Wasn’t that true until the early 80s?”
I think I’d push that back a bit earlier–based on my dad’s stories of trying to find something to do with a math MA, the mid-seventies weren’t all that fantastic, either.
There’s the whole gender thing, too, which complicates things. In Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (much of which is set in the 1950s), she’s the first college graduate in her family. Being all 8th grade graduates (as I recall), her family has “golden ticket” ideas about a college diploma. Due to lack of savvy going in to the process, King doesn’t realize that not all colleges are equal and winds up at a no-name local school. She graduates, does a little graduate school and an ill-fated Sapphic romance, and then flounders around in secretarial work that she is grossly overqualified for while writing pulp fiction (“I Committed Adultery in a Diabetic Coma.”). It takes 20 some years for her to finally establish herself as a legitimate, mainstream writer.
Here’s a quote from where young Florence, about to graduate from college, realizes her situation:
“Ever since high school I had been one of the special girls because of my grades; A’s were the source of my power, but A’s came from school and school would soon end. When it did, I would go from “God, she’s a brain,” to “Hey, she’s a secretary,” except I did not know shorthand.”
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My father was hired into a tenure-track position at a Canadian polytechnic the summer after completing his Masters (I think he was actually hired before he finished); he completed his PhD over the next 8 years while teaching, and he retired recently from that tenured position after 37 years in it.
My mother, who had a Masters in teaching, taught while my father was doing his Masters, before I was born, having been hired for the first job for which she interviewed. She chose to re-enter the workforce by starting her own business, which came pre-loaded with customers (a school cafeteria in the school my sister and I attended), from which she retired 3 years ago.
I don’t take career advice from my parents. 🙂
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I think there’s some sort of broad gap between “goal squashing” and “imparting reality.” The second can certainly be done without the former.
“I want to be a doctor,” is a perfectly fine goal. The response should be, “Great. If you want to be a doctor, here’s what you need to do . . .” and then list the classes to take, the GPA you will need, the time you will have to expend, etc. Then, most students will realistically think, “Hell, I don’t want to do any of that stuff. I hadn’t realized it was so hard. I should re-consider.” But a few will think, “Oh, I didn’t realize I would have to work so hard and do so much. I guess I better up my game here.”
It is not a professor’s job to squash goals. It is to inform what the kids what any particular path will reasonably consist of, and let them make their own decisions.
I recently re-connected with an old friend Mike on “Facebook,” and had this memory from junior high, or him sitting around the house with our friends talking about high school. Some were going to go to the “regular” public school, others like me were applying to the magnet liberal arts high school. Mike, neither of whose parents went to college, said he was going to apply to Vo-Tech because he wanted to be an engineer. My father, who was in the next room, overheard and told him that if he wanted to be an engineer, he needed to go to college, so he’d be better off going to the magnet college prep science school. Mike had never considered this. He ended up taking my father’s advice (which should have been obvious to anyone whose parents knew how to get into college), went to the college prep school, and went on to college.
He is not an engineer now (according to Facebook), but he has a job that you need a college degree for, and I can’t help but think he is there because, in 1986, my dad stuck his two cents in for two minutes and told the boy that if you want to go to a good college, you should go to a college preparatory high school.
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There was a good example of know-how in Laura’s commencement post:
“Steve was annoyed that he couldn’t graduate with me. His adviser decided that Steve really needed to reorganize his entire dissertation, which would require another year’s worth of work. Lesson – Never work on a dissertation with a faculty member who had never been asked to serve as an adviser before and was simultaneously retiring.”
On the one hand, that sounds blazingly obvious. On the other hand, there are so many people who make exactly that mistake, or the related mistake of choosing a nice adviser who doesn’t publish. This is exactly the sort of issue where a parental tap on the shoulder can be helpful (assuming the academic parent is of recent enough vintage to know better).
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Well that’s the thing about kids who are the second generation in their field. Do they have contacts and benefit from a bit of bias? Perhaps. But it’s also possible that they just have tons more data. They know the score.
To my mind this should not be about squashing goals but rather about imparting information. Squash the goal and you’ve lost the kid’s motivation, which is after all the power source here. You need to harness that motivation effectively.
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One of the dreams I would like to squash early and often is the hipster farming dream. Unless they are 1) wealthy 2) from a farm background with land and equipment 3) running an “oregano” grow-op (MH’s suspicion) or 4) doing it as a second job, all those sweet young people you see featured in the NYT are headed for massive disenchantment.
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While I’m at it, the Bed and Breakfast retirement dream also deserves squashing. People buy those who would never consider just managing one for a year to figure out if they actually have the stamina for it. I suspect they may have confused the experience of staying at a B&B with the experience of running one.
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More of a plan than a suspicion if the raises don’t come back.
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