Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported the results of an interesting survey that should encourage some reflection and review by both university graduates and businesses, and hopefully the various educational institutions as well.
From April to June of this year, over 10 000 currently employed university graduates (graduated university between 1999 to 2010) were asked to rate how satisfied they were with their current career path. Naturally, the result which has received the most attention is the rather low satisfaction rate found among psychology majors, who ranked almost 20-percentage points lower than the second-to last group on the scale. While the title of the Wall Street Journal article succinctly explains the reason behind this low satisfaction rate among psychology majors, there’s something more disturbing about the overall findings that should really be the focus here.
Looking at the group of university graduates that ranked as the most satisfied in terms of their current career path, we see that only 54% of respondents replied in the affirmative. And this result comes from a group of employees that the survey authors define as working “within a set of jobs deemed satisfying, well-paid, and with growth potential”. In other words, regardless of what discipline you study while attending university, there’s a 50% or more chance that you won’t be satisfied with the career path it helps you to take.
Evidently, businesses are doing their part through offering opportunities for growth and reasonable financial renumeration, given the profile of the respondents that were the focus of this study. So what then can we make of this discrepancy among employees who are well-paid and have those desired opportunities for professional growth, and their assessment that their career path hasn’t lived up to what they hoped for? Looking at the other key player in this equation, it’s clear that the disconnect seen here comes from
the educational institutions that people attend. Specifically, with their expectations of how their education will help them secure the career path they wish to undertake and what they actually experience once they’re out in the ‘real world’.
This is where many will argue that the point of seeking a university education is not simply to get a better job, but to develop a sense of knowledge and understanding about a particular discipline or field of study. But here is where I think we need to cast aside such lofty assumptions and ask instead what is the purpose of education? Certainly one purpose of educational institutions is to serve the community in which it’s based, namely in helping to guide individuals toward becoming productive members of that community, instead of mere drains on their resources.
This in many ways reflects the role of leadership as well, where one of the responsibilities of being a leader is to encourage the development of their employee’s strengths, both for the benefit of the organization as well as the individual.
Another responsibility of leadership is to seek out those individuals who can best help you to reach your organization’s objectives. Here again, we see a common thread between leadership and our educational systems as universities regularly seek out individuals, both students and professors, who they believe will help them achieve the goals they have for their institution.
This line of thought, though, leads to another key question we need to ask in light of such findings. To find out what this question is, click here to read this guest post on Dr. Bret Simmons blog at BretLSimmons.com.
If we think about why people become dissatisfied with anything, it usually centers around an internal struggle with what we value and or efficacy in realizing those values. It does not surprise me in corporate life, that human values take a back seat to corporate values. I wonder if similar studies were conducted at workplaces like Google, or companies where there is emphasis on more holistic and synergistic integration of the values and dreams of the people who make up the organization with the goals of the organization, we would find very different results.
Good point Tanveer. One that I was blind to. In my world everything was looked at from a practical position. It seems foreign to me that colleges would be teaching yet not allowing students to practice what they are learning. Especially in Bret's Ethics class. The administrations actions fly against Kant's Categorical imperative, and further away from his arguments that reason is structured from experience. Are we that far into the theoretical world and out of the practical one that we are setting students up for failure? I agree the study warrants more attention, But I would also like to explore more of the successful stories as well.
I couldn't agree with you more, Richard. There is a strong tendency for us to focus mostly on either what's going wrong or on what's going well. The problem with such approaches is that it only allows us to see one-half of the equation – by obsessing over what's going wrong, we fail to see what's working and figuring out how to mirror those successes in the areas where we're struggling. Similarly, by narrowing one's focus only to what's going right, you can overlook the problems that are arising and which inevitably due to neglect will grow and soon appear to be these insurmountable challenges.
That's why like in so many endeavours, a balanced approach is key to making sure you can understand and appreciate the full picture.
The problem I see in our educational institutions is that it's becoming increasingly isolated from the community, that it's creating this concept that learning begins and ends when one enters and leave the educational system. A more instructive and realistic view is to provide students with the tools and understanding to appreciate learning as a life-long process and not something that's restricted to the classroom and which only has value depending on the grade assigned to it.
Creating that understanding and impression on students will not only help them as they migrate from the education system into the workforce, but it will also demonstrate a true sense of leadership in helping others to continue to grow by providing them with the impetus to keep pressing ahead, even when they are no longer under your direct care.
As for me there are no new findings in this research. You don't need 5 or more year after graduation for asking the question – are you satisfied with your degree? Ask current students, they will tell you the same answer – no. Most of them come here to get the knowledge that they will use in the future path, but instead they get only theoretical stuff, that is far from real life. Here is a list of thing that should be explained during studying – how to pay taxes, how to provide first-aid and so on. Until we don't change something in our educational system, we won't get better results.