the safer the plan, the narrower the possibilities?
This month, I sent parents of graduating seniors the same article that I have shared for three Aprils now: “The Worst Advice Parents Can Give First-Year Students”.
It makes an uncomfortable argument: that the instinct to steer teens toward professional safety (toward certainty, toward what “works”) often leads them to get less out of university, not more. This year that article popped up on the same day that I read this Chronicle piece, “How Colleges Stopped Rewarding Curiosity” which makes a related point from a different angle: when the stakes feel high (cost, debt, career pressure) exploration starts to look like a luxury.
This feels particularly relevant to my work with international families, many of whom are putting a career’s worth of savings into their children’s education in the USA and Canada. For 12 years, I’ve helped families make careful, strategic decisions about university pathways, and those decisions are grounded in very real financial, cultural, and emotional stakes. When a family is investing years of savings across countries, cultures, and currencies, it makes sense in that "gut instinct" kind of way, to prioritize clarity and outcomes over experimentation. Computer science over Environmental Technology. Finance over Psychology. I’ve often reinforced that instinct, in an attempt to be culturally aware of Vietnamese pragmatism, and out of respect for the very real financial, professional, and cultural stakes involved.
But in the best possible way, these articles have been good prompts for the kind of reflection that happens on dog walks and train rides. As more and more families come in with increasingly specific concerns about career outcomes and choosing the “right” major, this feels like a particularly useful moment to examine what that carefulness might be costing. Many of the outcomes families say they want (a distinctive path, upward mobility, a life or at least a set of life options that looks meaningfully different from the previous generation) don’t typically emerge from perfectly optimized decisions. They tend to come from combinations that couldn’t have been predicted in advance: taking a class outside one’s field instead of stacking “useful” electives, choosing a smaller or less obvious internship over the popular option, adding a second area of study out of genuine interest, or saying yes to an opportunity that complicates an otherwise efficient plan. These choices rarely look strategic in the moment, but over time they expand what is possible.
The issues/tensions as I see them:
In general it's very difficult to optimize simultaneously for certainty and for long-term career flexibility
With the pace that industries and society at large is changing, accurate prediction is increasingly unlikely
Parents are drawing from what has worked in their own careers and in their immediate circles, which can skew toward established industries and familiar paths. In fast-changing markets, that can mean that emerging fields or less conventional opportunities are underweighted—not because they lack potential, but because they aren’t yet visible or legible within those networks.
This is not about suggesting that families are making mistakes; their decisions are logical responses to the incentives and pressures they face. But it may be worth acknowledging that in trying to minimize risk as early as possible, we can also narrow the range of opportunities available later on.
It may be worth asking, more often and more explicitly, not just “what feels safe?” but “what expands what’s possible?” … particularly at a time when both education and the wider world are characterized by constant change and a high degree of uncertainty.
