Back to School : Will Education Land You a Job?

As millions of students rush to colleges and universities starting this month, the perennial questions posed to parents as much as to each student may include how to sustain the latter’s education up to the time he graduates and what to expect once he does. Yet the issue on what the student should take could be more thought of and may need more serious consideration.  As a learner, is the course you have set for yourself your best scenario? Will your education land you a good paying job?


 How do you choose your line of study? Do you look at the job market since it will tell you who companies hire as their employees? Would you align the knowledge you want to get from college with what these employers need? Or would you assess what you are apt to do and study along that line? But you may not be sure of what you really want at this point.  So would you go by where your peers are going, or go by what your parents tell you to take or just get into anything as long as you enroll and maybe decide later? Or maybe do and learn something somewhere other than in and from school?  

As you may already know, certain factors come into play when we look at success stories of people and one essential is education. Education from school? Not necessarily. Education by self? Definitely basic.  Whether you go to school or stay out of it, education is the precursor of your life changes and you need to take it upon yourself that you ACTUALLY learn something from what you do in life. Do something and it’s a big plus when you do something that you are interested in- that way you have a big chance at improving at and mastering in it. Alongside your personal growth and development, you NEED to earn your living.  How? By earning your pay for the job you learned to do. And in our lifetime this pay is usually in the form called money. You will be paid for what you do – for a person, for a group of people, for a company. In return, the money you get will buy you things that you need to live decently, unless you find a barter-like exchange to meet all your needs which is very unlikely.

Attending school, a student’s life is not easy at all. You need to respect time schedules, endure the brunt of commuting through daily traffic and smog, bear listening to what you think are “boring” instructors, learn from what you read, hear and do so you could pass exams, do research and make reports. If you were learning from somewhere else like home you may take the time you want to do things- it would probably be as lengthy as or even more than what it takes when one is in school. You may still need to make trips to shops but maybe not as often as daily. You may still need somebody or a number of people to function as “instructors”.  You may not need cash as often as an in-school learner does.

Whatever you choose and after all’s been said and done, ask yourself: will my education land me a job that will pay? A question you alone can answer.