Looks like education is a pretty good thing

I've realized the blog has been rather dull lately and when I do actually post, just a bit on the whiny side. Regardless of how disrupted my life feels, or how justified I might be in annoyance, that makes for bad blogging.

So I decided to go back through blog post drafts and finish up some of them. I found this Kelly survey about Satisfaction with education and jobs Of course since the blog is all about me, I found upon re-reading the article that I can relate personally to some of the findings:

Key findings among Canadian survey participants include:

72 percent wish that they had studied further.
41 percent wish that they had studied something totally different.
12 percent say that they definitely chose the wrong career, while 24 percent are 'not sure.'
28 percent say that their school education did not prepare them well for working life.
17 percent say that their post-school education did not prepare them well for working life.

Okay, so I can't relate to the first one. I'm ready to be done studying for a while. Aside from perhaps pottery or basketweaving classes when I've retired, I cannot imagine what other (formal) education I would want to further attain.

But I can relate to those who wished they'd studied something different and those who have doubts about their choice of career. These days I find myself wondering if the last 7 (seven!) years have been a collosal waste.

I can also relate to the quarter of respondents who said their education did not prepare them well for working life. Although my doctoral program has a very good orientation/training program about teaching for which I'm grateful almost every day I step into the classroom, I feel entirely out of my element as a scholar. I have so little sense of what's expected of me after I finish this thing that I would agree with those people that I'm not prepared.

Of course I'll do what everyone else does: fake it till I make it...!

But the last one makes me wonder - the 17% who said their post-secondary education didn't prepare them for life. ???? Is that really an expectation of a post-secondary education?

I realize that a lot of students come into post-secondary with very little sense of how to conduct themselves as adults - I see it every semester. But in that way, they are no different than the other high school graduates who have to figure out how to now be adults as well. It's not the kind of thing that you can learn from a manual, or from someone else. It's learning by trial and error. Sure, the easiest transitions are when those errors aren't life-altering. But shouldn't there have been a base set in high school and more importantly at home, that prevent "new" adults from making the most disastrous errors as they figure it out?

No one can really tell you how to act like an adult. You figure it out by interacting with other people who expect you to act as an adult. When you get a bad response, then you try another approach (or at least most people do). So how is it that your post-secondary education is supposed to prepare you for life? It's not something you can learn in a classroom, so how does the post-secondary institution become responsible for it? This response confuses me, and I have to admit, I'm not sure if that's just because of the way I'm reading it, or whether I really can't figure out what it points to.

The article also notes that 63% of Canadians wished they'd worked harder during their education. Perhaps they've convinced themselves that the lectures they skipped were the ones that would've better prepared them for life?