How teens pick their future

Perhaps no decision is more important than a secondary student’s choice of career or further education. And yet often this decision is made with very little information or even much thought. A 16- or 17-year-old makes life-changing choices with little idea about what they involve.

The Productivity Commission’s report on New Models of Tertiary Education shows both the depth of the problem and how difficult it will be to fix. It’s going to take a lot more than careers advisers handing out more brochures and bumpf. The problem goes to the heart of education policy.

Many people told the commission the system was a mess, and so it is. Successive reviews, including one by the Education Review Office in 2009, have pointed to the poor job done by careers advisers. That review suggested that the whole system needs to change, with staff helping students to think about their futures and to develop the skills they will need.

This means a change of mindset for both students and teachers. Major research back in 2005 found that decision-making on these matters starts well before Year 11, and often as early as Year 7. So early identification of a student’s interests is important, and the student needs to know that his or her subject choices will matter.

The decision to undertake tertiary study, of course, has enormous implications for future income and life chances. But this decision also raises deep issues about the gap in educational performance between white and brown and the children of the wealthy and those of the poor.

Here, success tends to breed success and failure leads to more failure. Research led by the commission suggested that the biggest contributor to the gap between Pakeha and Maori students’ participation in bachelor’s level study was prior performance at school. Economic deprivation or poverty also played a part, though a smaller one. Part of the gap, moreover, had unexplained causes which might be about culture, or discrimination, or something else.

The point, however, is that lifting Maori and Pasifika attendance at university will partly depend on lifting performance at school. This, of course, remains one of the deepest issues facing the education system.

But the report also suggests that universities have a role to play. They cannot simply blame the problem on the schools, although too many do. It cites the example of American colleges such as Georgia State University, which has successfully closed the gap between black and white students without lowering academic standards.

The commission’s recommendation to abolish University Entrance is part of its attempt to make the system more flexible and more responsive to students’ needs. In part, this simply recognises that UE is not the clear-cut barrier to further education it once was. Students who gain it often find that particular universities already set their own higher bar to admission in one or more subjects. And students who don’t get UE can often find other ways to study at university.

In all of this, the report is a useful go at a serious problem with major ramifications for social justice.

Students choose a career without much information.