The Mickey Mouse Degrees

Just the pursuance of an Associate, a Bachelor’s, a Master’s, an MPhil, an MS, or a Doctoral degree is not sufficient. The credential must justify the effort, the time, and the money spent upon its attainment. It is a thousand pities that the Pakistani students have been stuck in a wild goose chase since time immemorial since most of our schools, colleges, varsities, and Degree Awarding Institutions (DAIs) have proven themselves to be the endless money pits.

The concept of selling a particular course or a programme has been quite the common practice at the seats of learning (educational institutions) to sustain their businesses as opposed to sincerely assisting the learners in the procedure of their selection of majors by means of proffering educational and career counselling tailored to meet the requirements to prosper in this hyper-competitive world. Resultantly, the party who suffers the most by pursuing the Mickey Mouse (useless) degrees is that of students, whose professional lives are blown to smithereens by studying the worthless fields of study like those of Gender Studies and Philosophy.

What is needed to be fathomed is the fact that no matter how sincere and loving our parents have been towards us, they simply cannot guide us educationally, given that most of them possess ten to twelve years of education, which is equivalent to a Matriculation or an Intermediate certification.

The question which arises then is that of whom to be approached to seek educational counselling? The retort to it is to be in the quest of those educators, who are religious, scholarly, and impartial with no vested interests of their own; those who are not supposed to be contacted for educative counsel are the ones who own their own educational institutions since such individuals most likely shall encourage students to seek admissions into their programmes for the purpose of acquiring the monetary gains no matter how worthless those majors are, as opposed to making them pursue the learning of substance.

The learners have been kept under the dark since inception merely to sell futile courses, or to justify the presence of the nugatory departments at colleges and universities at the expense of their careers in our country, wherein approximately twenty-three million children have been out of school, and those who have been fortunate enough to seek education have been misguided into the pursuance of the worthless degrees, which leads to their inappropriate careers in irrelevant fields.

For instance, a learner who had pursued a degree in Punjabi, a regional language of Pakistan, thereafter, had a career in instructing Science at a school, which made his acquisition of a degree in Punjabi useless, given the regionality of the major, he had failed to have access to the manifold opportunities across Pakistan and abroad; similarly, a plethora of students studied Commerce (Business) only to work under the thumb of a boss; however, they had been instructed to initiate their own business models in the first place.

They ought to have been their own bosses as opposed to being bossed around. Multifarious students also study those branches of knowledge, which have some scope abroad; however, before doing so, one has to comprehend that out of millions of Pakistani students, around 60,000 have been successful to secure visas to study in foreign countries on the bases of their educative backgrounds, financial standings, and luck.

Not each student out of 231 million Pakistanis has the merit and the means to move abroad to learn or to work, no matter how dire the economic condition gets in our endeared homeland.

In a country like Pakistan, wherein the yearly budget has been earmarking close to a 2 per cent on education, hiring the qualified career counsellors for the students with the intent to proffering them appropriate pathways for the realisation of their utmost potential in their respective careers seems to be a far-fetched idea; ergo, it is incumbent upon each preceptor to play his pivotal role by providing counselling to his pupils with the intent to please Allah the Almighty and His Seal of the Prophets Muhammad ﷺ since it has been the Deed of the Holy Prophets, which in Arabic is referred to as a ‘Shura’.

In order not to have the professional lives of the students destroyed, the teachers must take the charge to guide them to the best of their knowledge for their educative and professional betterment. It is also incumbent upon the learners to independently align their interests towards those majors, which can make them earn a living since an inclination towards a specific worthless branch of knowledge can fail one to put food on the table after its pursuance for four to six years.

Be mindful of the fact that being a know-all shall be utterly deleterious to your success; seek educative and career counselling as a student from a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) by putting your ego aside since being teachable shall make you capable in this world and the Hereafter.