debunking college myths #6: college is about students finding their path
COLLEGE MYTH #6: College is about students finding their path.
If that’s true (which it isn’t), I have some questions:
why don’t colleges provide support to guide students along that path?
There are 18-year-olds staring at course catalogs thicker than “War and Peace,” and the only guidance they get is from an overwhelmed academic advisor who’s juggling 400 students.
If college is truly about students finding their path, then colleges should be purpose-built in every way to facilitate that.
Otherwise, you’re just handing someone a bag of ingredients without a cookbook, telling them to make a four-course meal they’ve never made before, and walking away yelling, “Good luck!” (Oh, and half the ingredients are missing too.)
why does college actively limit exploration?
If colleges actually cared about students discovering what they’re good at and what they love, they'd maximize students’ opportunity to be exposed to as many topics, skills, tools, ideas, and experiences as possible.
Instead, colleges limit kids’ options by locking them into courses for an entire semester even if the student realizes the class isn’t for them or if they love the class so much that they could have completed it in two weeks.
Colleges don’t enable exposure; they minimize it.
why are we asking students to take on crushing debt just to explore?
Telling an 18-year-old to take on six figures of debt to “figure things out” is like handing someone a credit card and having them take $100,000 worth of trips to figure out where they want to live.
It sounds adventurous . . . until the bill shows up.
And you also realize you never should have gone to half of the cities you traveled to, and you missed half the cities you should have visited.
Exploration shouldn’t come with lifelong financial baggage. (Get it?! Baggage!)
can meaningful exploration happen in a socially and intellectually homogenous bubble?
Real self-discovery happens when you're surrounded by people from different walks of life—different ages, backgrounds, career stages, and worldviews.
Instead, colleges silo 18- to 22-year-olds who mostly look the same, think the same, and are all equally unsure about what they’re doing. It’s really hard to “find your path” if everyone around you is just as lost.
what percentage of students pursue careers related to their majors?
Answer: somewhere between 50% and 25%! Okay, so students explored and picked a path (a major), but for 50% to 75% of students, it was the wrong path?!
Don’t get me wrong; exploration is very important, but don’t confuse what colleges do with actual exploration. Exploration is intentional and directional.
