Educational institutions have a responsibility to dissuade students from pursuing fields of study in which they are unlikely to succeed..

My take on this issue:

This statement is the very negative form of human of human behavior. I do not agree with this statement.

We human beings have come to the state where we are today by taking the wrong, unconventional paths and making mistakes. It is very essential for people to make mistakes, and hence choose the wrong path before they actually get to the right one.

The task of an educational institution is not to persuade or dissuade a person to take a path which they think is the right one for the candidate. If that was true Steve Jobs would have never left college unfinished, or Galileo would have never been born to discover the fact that earth is not flat.

Although time and again the institutions somehow think that it is their duty to persuade a person to take to a path where they think that person should go. But these paths are the paths which are already laid out, and someone will always take them.

A path which no one has taken yet will only lead to a new one, and for which, the decision should rely only on the hands of that candidate.

All an institute could and should do is to lay out the information to each fields of study and explain to the student the success which has already been achieved. But, if they force the student to take a path for a specific success, a path to unbound success will never be achieved.

The fact of today’s world is exactly what this statement is stating. People are fearful. They want a stable career and a stable life, which is not bad at all. But the truth is, if everyone does that we will never flourish. Human race will die in a blink of an eye.

Finding new methods of success is what makes humans human. And depriving them of this discretion by enforcing a “right path to success” is just inhuman.