There's potentially two ways to answer this question. One of them might be that a lot of young people come to university with less than well-informed career goals. What I see in my research, and just casually talking—I teach first-year courses—to students, is that everybody wants to be a lawyer or maybe a doctor. Perhaps we could step back a bit and give young people in schools career information that's more realistic, that doesn't allow young people to come out with goals that are commendable but.... Surely we need more than just lawyers and doctors for a country like Canada to function well.
To me, the fact that many of the young people in my study did not go to medical school but instead became public health nurses or occupational therapists is actually not a bad thing. It is a bad thing only if it is a career move that the young person later regrets. If it's one they make willingly and happily and quietly, it's a different story.
Part of the problem is the data seems to suggest that the people who make these downward shifts tend to be from less-advantaged backgrounds. They come with higher aspirations and somehow get frustrated, if that's the right word, along the way.
It's tricky because I don't want to say they shouldn't aim high. I don't want to say that working-class kids in high school should be told not to become doctors or lawyers. That's not my point, but maybe my point is that some more accurate and realistic career advice early on would help. I think it could also help to think a bit more about how we support people in postgraduate professional programs. They're very expensive. I know that not a single one of these programs would come out and say they're trying to not admit poor people. I've done some of these presentations to professional faculties and they often say, “That's not our intention. We want to get the best people into the program”, but quite often it comes out that way. Some people cannot get that experience and don't have those connections to be competitive in the end.
Maybe there are ways at university we can guide young people who do not have the connections through their families into internships, into placements, into legal aid offices, into working with doctors, and shadowing doctors. Maybe we can find ways in which universities can play a more active role in helping young people to do that, to gain those connections. I think once they establish them, things work out much better.
In my follow-up study, I see that young men and women who go into public health and nursing do well once they get their placements. They find employment, they connect, and they build networks through their programs—but they need to get into them first.