Source: http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=12187
Publish Date: 18-Aug-2005
Special – Education
If M.J. Lorca could travel back in time a dozen years, she would kick her 19-year-old selfs ass. Thats when she started waffling through 10 years of postsecondarya liberal-arts exploration that cost her more than $40,000 in student loans, plus interest. Now 31, without a degree, marketable skilldeficient, and hiding from creditors, she thinks she has found her spark: nursing. She starts at Douglas College in February.
I was so self-centred as a teen, I couldnt see more than six months ahead, Lorca admitted, noting that the mandatory visits to her high-school guidance counsellor were useless. She didnt visit her college or university advising centre, based on that experience. She blames only herself for her predicament.
Lorca is an extreme case, a bit of a waffling-student parable, really. But waffling, or exploring, is the way most students journey through school, if statistics and anecdotes tell the truth.
About half of postsecondary students drop out or change programs by the end of their first year, Statistics Canada reported in 1997. Up to four out of five students dont know what they want to do with their education when they start it, says the governments summary report for its 2003 BC College and Institute Short Stay Pilot Survey.
Just 75 percent of students completed the college or institute credential they set out to earn, according to another report, the 2003 B.C. Student Outcomes survey. Furthermore, just 44 percent of former students reported that their job is very related to the training they took.
A big part of the waffling comes from crummy, outdated career counselling, according to the man who is responsible for some of it. Phillip Jarvis, a Burnaby South secondary school grad circa 1963, developed the Choices career-exploration software in 1976. Most youngish Canadians will remember taking the test in high school. Off the top of your head, you answer questions about your interests and skills (a challenge at 15 years of age), and the test spits out career suggestions. You could be a pilot! A farmer! A teacher! A bank teller!
It probably told you to be a funeral director, Jarvis said with a groan during a phone interview with the Georgia Straight from Ottawa, where he is now the vice president of partnership development at the nonprofit National Life/Work Centre. When I developed it, I thought career planning was about choosing a career direction and finding out how to get there. My assumption was, if you can find the right destination, you just need to figure out how to get there and youll be happy for life.
Even though Choices is still the most popular career-exploration tool in the country, Jarvis admits the concept is past its prime. The work world has changed significantly. Even after Choices spent 29 years in classrooms, Jarvis knows that half of students graduating from postsecondary institutions cant connect what they learned to their post-school lives. And the majority of adults think theyre in the wrong job.
Jarvis has since developed what he believes is a 21st-century tool, called Blueprint. Instead of answering the question What do you want to be when you grow up?, it promotes developing a lifelong set of competencies, which include self-knowledge, intentionality and purposefulness, relationship intelligence, embracing change, and characterhonesty, integrity, and perseverance. The good news, Jarvis said, is that half of all ministries of education in Canada have adopted Blueprints alongside Choices.
He saves his harshest criticism for postsecondary counselling departments.
Theyre stuck in 1978, he said, mentioning that some of his best friends are university career counsellors. The system is stuck in an old paradigm, and its not sure anything is wrong with itself. Professors are not facing what their students are facing. Theyre good people, but theyre trapped. Education changes slower than anything else in the country, and career is changing at an accelerated rate. He called postsecondary career counselling the weakest link in the chain.
Blueprint wont help students make specific academic decisions at postsecondary, but it does promote intentionalityin other words, moving through school without waffling. Responsibility for ones school and career path, Jarvis said, are on the shoulders of the student. Were all free, he said, but freedom is limited to knowledge. Were not liberating people until were equipping them to take charge.
At the University of Victoria, the counselling department is four years into a five-year pilot program called ACT, the Applied Career Transitions Project. It integrates some of Jarviss cutting-edge counselling strategies, including building self-knowledge and deeper reflection, and connecting paid work to home life. However, its not available to students until they finish their degrees. Theres nothing like it for first-years.
It came out of the identification that the transition from university to work that relates to a students interests or actual degree is a very difficult one, said Jennifer Margison, UVics manager of career services. Group and individual counselling sessions are available for new students, but they are based on the more traditional what do you want to be model.
Visit Vancouverite Mark OMearas site, canadastudentdebt.com/, and the problem with our postsecondary advising system is painfully clear. Hundreds of students, who either graduated with or without marketable skills, have created a sorrowful forum of posts.
The government makes funds available to people who would not otherwise be able to attend school, wrote poster Ferron in November 2004. It provides the means but leaves it up to us to do the rest. I suppose that is what we call freedom in our society.
Ferron goes on with a chilling regret: I made wrong choices when I was in university and I blame myself and my ignorance at the time Were I able to do it all over again I would have gone into college and done a two-year program in a practical field with a high employment rate.
Economically, OMeara told the Straight on the phone, the solution isnt as easy as choosing practical fields with a high employment rate. The market may bottom out by the time a student graduatesas happened, for example, with computer-science graduates during the dot-com crash.
No one has a crystal ball, OMeara said. If you can find one, thats what you need. You have a better choice to see a psychic than an adviser. As for those who advocate education for educations sake, OMeara said theyre living in a different world. Theyre removed from reality. Most people dont have the financial resources to pay for that [liberal-education exploration] any more. Especially when theres no skills training at the end of a $50,000, four-year degree.
This is somewhat of a modern phenomenon. In the 1960s, career-unsure student Donna Chesney lived at St. Pauls Hospital during her nursing training. Tuition was free, rent was free, supplies were free, and food was free. At the end of her four-year program, Chesney graduated as a registered nurse. In exchange, the hospital got years of free labour out of her during her schooling.
Today at BCIT, an RN course costs $2,718 per year for three-and-a-half years ($9,513). Add $9,602 in supplies, plus other costs, for a total of more than $19,000plus living expenses.
The contrast is stark. Expensive education is the 21st-century reality.
At UBC, a 120-credit bachelor of arts degree costs $16,368 in tuition alone. A one-year forest resources technology program at BCIT costs $4,767. Those are public postsecondary prices. Try between $12,400 and $19,000 (including books and supplies) for a 12-month practical-nurse diploma at the private Sprott-Shaw Community College; tuition for the 12-month 3-D animation and visual-effects program at Vancouver Film School costs $29,500; and the six-month program at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts costs $12,070. Once youre in one of these programs, theres no room for dicking around or deciding that that career isnt right for you.
Lorca, who decided multiple times that her programs were not right for her, discovered her passion for nursing at the North Shore Compass Centre, a nonprofit career-counselling centre funded by Human Resources Development Canada. The 33-hour Implicit Career Search course offers unemployed Vancouverites the chance to reflect, individually and as part of a group, on the question What do I want to offer the world? Its the kind of contemporary career counselling Jarvis advocates for a fulfilling and prosperous life.
Every book Ive read about career says, Know yourself and your purpose, then they dont give you the tools to do that, the centres program coordinator, Sharon Clarke, told the Straight. Her clients often arrive only knowing that theyve wasted 20 years working at a job they hate, and theyve hit a wall. Theyve arrived at their average age of 42 without self-knowledge and without ever having taken the time to think deeply about what they want to offer the world.
Clarkes dream is to offer her program to students transitioning from high school to university, before they get trapped in debt. Now the course is available to anyoneso long as theyre unemployed.
Anyone who would like to get more focused about what theyre doing should take the Implicit Career Search, Clarke said. It can save you a lot of time and a lot of money.
With tuition at a premium in 2005, it could be 33 hours well spent.
