Educational institutions should actively encourage their students to choose fields of study in which jobs are plentiful Write a response in which you discuss your views on the policy and explain your reasoning for the position you take In developing and s

The choice of one’s field is not a trivial one, after deliberation on the course to major in, students are left most of the time undecisive. The prompt suggests Education Institutions to actively inspire their students to choose fields of study in which jobs are enormous. I strongly disagree with this for two reasons.

Firstly, the job market is ever changing, the previous decade ‘hot job’ might not be the case for the new decade. Take for example, during the 1940s, there was job boom in nuclear energy, after the world most destructive weapon ever made by man was built by Oppenheimer using nuclear energy. This gave rise to major countries investing in nuclear energy, not just in building nuclear weapons, but also as a source of power for electricity and production processes. As not only was it cost effective, it is a cleaner energy compared to it its counterparts like coal. A surge of interests by students in the field due to the ‘large’ amount of jobs at that time. Is that the case today? With the recent environmental disasters that occurred from Nuclear plants, such as the Chernobyl incident. Countries have drifted from using nuclear energy as source of power due to its unstable nature. In addition, artificial intelligence is the present era trend in terms of availability and lucrative nature of jobs, but will this be the case in next 20 years? History tells us no.

Further, based on research, it has been shown that employees perform better on jobs that make them happy than vice versa. Thus, student’s choice of field primarily due to availability of jobs is skewed, as that might not necessarily be their job of interests and in that case leading to them sad and depressed with a job that is monotonous and unexciting. For example, a student who is talented in music and has great passion for singing can choose computer science as his major just because of the promise of huge number of the jobs available. This student can force himself to learn the context, try his possible best to program, then after the program, get an office job, and spend his daily time staring at his laptop for hours performing mundane tasks, with a wallpaper background of a popstar, and at his leisure wandering what he could have been if he had taken the path he desires. Likewise the case, if educational institutions encourage to take fields that they deem the best interest in terms of abundance on the jobs, not only will the student be most like performing below par if he gets a job there but the institution will also be blamed and lawsuit made against them – which has occurred quite a number of times and also cause the school to lose some prestige.

In conclusion, it is possible, that encouraging a student to choose a field that has plentiful jobs might be beneficial to student in terms of avoiding an unfortunate occurrence of being jobless and becoming financially secure. However, the student will not be able to compete with his rivals and carve a niche for himself as he will not be passionate about what he is doing compared to his mate who will feel well fulfilled with what he is doing. Thus, educational institutions should instead foster passion rather than availability of jobs.