Does Forcing a Career Choice in Eighth Grade Increase the Dropout Rate?
It is possible that the basic idea of the career magnet high schools–that students can make wise career choices in eighth grade–is flawed. Perhaps a number of students drop out of school because they realize that they have made the wrong choice; however, changing career goals need not lead a student to drop out. In our interviews (Flaxman, Guerrero, & Gretchen, 1997; Heebner, Crain, Kiefer, & Si, 1992), we met a number of students who came to realize that they had no interest in a particular career once they had learned a little more about it: “I thought I would like accounting, but it turned out just to be all math. I wound up hating it.” Other students talked about planning a different career while they were in high school studying for a career in which they had already lost interest. It seemed that many of these students were able to learn a lot about careers and themselves in the process of making a change. We often concluded that being trained for what turns out to be the wrong
