Getting teenagers to apply for a ‘career’ degree is a complete nonsense

Friends in my class applied for law, physiotherapy and medicine. Not a single one of us are in any of those jobs now

It is the mid-1990s and like every other teenager, I’m trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I’m obsessed with Nirvana, and have confided in my English teacher that I’d quite like to be a rock journalist one day. She hasn’t much choice but to nod approvingly; every essay I’ve handed into her this year, whether it’s on A Day at the Beach or Youth is Wasted on the Young, is somehow about Kurt Cobain. I tell my classmates I want to work at MTV, or a record company, in London. They think I’m demented. Pure cracked.

In any case, my mother has ideas of her own about what I’ll be doing. “Doctors can take six months of the year off, and they make £1,000 a week,” she informs me nonchalantly, on the way home from school in the car.

I’m still not sure where she was getting her fake news from back in 1990, but I drank the lies in. £1,000 a week! I’d do pretty much anything for that kind of money, I reasoned. Feck MTV. Medicine, and six months off a year, it would have to be.

I’d spend the next two years struggling valiantly through chemistry and biology (I say “valiantly”, but more often it was a question of shouting at the teacher, “I don’t get this!”).

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Back then, the CAO points for degree and diploma courses were required reading in between revision. Prominent on the list were what we’ll call the “big ticket” subjects. Medicine in UCD. Law in Trinity. Veterinary medicine. Science. Architecture. The points were prohibitively high – they hovered around 550 and 600 at that point – which instantly made them prestigious and aspirational. Actuarial studies, at around 650 points, was another “ooooh, I’m going for that” course, even if we didn’t really know what it was.

On my CAO form back in 1994, my top degree choices were medicine, pharmacy and dentistry. There are only 32 teeth in the mouth, 17-year-old me reasoned. How complicated could it be? I threw a few wild cards down; food science, linguistics and – oy vey – telecommunications.

Occasionally, I think of the parallel universe me, who liked chemistry and thrived in biology, and spent the next two decades looking into people's mouths for eight hours a day

The CAO points per course are calculated in proportion to the amount of applicants versus the number of places available. Arts, with points in the mid-300s and a relative bounty of places in universities like UCD, NUIG, UCC and Maynooth, was seen as a less prestigious degree; a fallback, or something you’d do while you made up your mind on which nice, 600-point profession you’d eventually land into.

After five years of academic drilling and rote learning, we all seemingly hungered for the financial and economic surety of the professions. Friends in my class applied for law, physiotherapy, medicine, politics. At 16 and 17, we were punch-drunk on sensibility, obedience and fiscal practicality, at exactly the time in our lives when we probably needn’t have been.

I need barely point out that not a single one of us are in any of those jobs now.  The careers that eventually brought us contentment – yoga instructor, jewellery designer, music promoter or café owner – were nowhere to be seen on the CAO form.

Spoiler alert; I did not spend the next couple of decades helping anyone get better, or even fixing people’s telephones. I ended up being offered my sixth choice on the CAO application form: arts. The moment I opened my college offer and saw it, my heart sank. I felt humiliated. Embarrassed that I thought I could ever be a surgeon. I did, however end up working in MTV in London. And in a record company. And, eventually, as a rock journalist.

A scholastic mindset?

Why exactly is it that when we are applying for college courses, we went for the sensible options, without fail? Perhaps we thought it was a good idea to get as professionally upskilled as possible while still on our parents’ dime. Maybe we are just in a very scholastic mindset after six years of school. It could be, too, that we’re simply rowing in with the crowd. And in Leaving Cert year, making parents and teachers proud doubtless looms large in our minds. Maybe at 17, we haven’t really yet learned to think for ourselves.

Asking someone of that age to apply for a career is a complete nonsense, is what I’m getting at. And I thought of it all as 61,000 students opened the first round of college offers this week, and given that CAO points rose significantly this year, there has likely been as much disappointment as jubilation for them.

Last week, a friend revealed that her son was struggling in his law degree; not with the workload, but because it felt ill-fitting. What he really wants to do is fashion. I wanted to shake him around the shoulders and frogmarch him to the nearest Topman. At least he’d get to his dreams quicker there than learning about Tort law in Trinity.

Occasionally, I think of the parallel universe me, who liked chemistry and thrived in biology, and spent the next two decades looking into people’s mouths for eight hours a day. With the greatest of respect to dentists, getting drunk with Coldplay, interviewing U2 in Tulsa and having meetings with Radiohead seemed a much better use of my time. Even my mum got used to it eventually.