At 23, Chelsea Taylor had three unfinished degrees, $30,000 in student debt, and no idea what she wanted to do with her life.
“I was feeling really, really lost at that stage and my brother recently had seen an ad on TV. Metro [Trains Melbourne] was looking to hire more women,” Ms Taylor said.
“He was like, ‘You could do that’, and I was like, ‘Sure, OK, what have I got to lose?'”
Ms Taylor has been a train driver for five years now and loves it.
She said she wished she had discovered it sooner.
“I wish my school and the adults in my life didn’t present non-university careers as lesser or fall-back options, so I wouldn’t have felt so pressured to keep restarting degrees,” Ms Taylor said.
“I was getting grades good enough to get into university, [so] that’s why I was going to go.
“That was my only option really, there was nothing else … given to me.”
Ms Taylor said it took her a long time to shake the notion that if she did not attend university she would be “wasting an opportunity”.
Reach for the ATARs
Research by the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE) in 2022 showed study pathways information for high school students was “significantly skewed towards university study, and students are uninformed about alternative pathways into post-secondary education”.
Curtin University associate professor Jane Coffey, who helped lead the study, said the research from surveys showed the extent of career advice for students was “pretty much subject selection”.
“And your subject selection was based on your grades, rather than your interests,” she said.
“We had a story in the report about a young student who was actually quite interested in doing maths, was looking at the sciences.
“But the teachers looked at the scores and said … ‘You’re not up for it’ and [they] were streamed into VET courses that that particular student wasn’t interested in doing.”
Another student had reported the opposite problem – they had great grades in physics and chemistry, but no interest in studying science.
“They were pushed into the ATAR subjects and six months through year 11 just went, ‘you know what, I can’t do this’ and it was quite stressful for the student and they dropped out,” Ms Coffey said.
“Which to me is just devastating.”
She said career advice also varied across schools depending on their socio-economic status (SES), with the report finding students from low SES backgrounds more likely to receive information on non-professional pathways.
“If they go to a private or elite school or a school that’s well resourced, then they’re generally getting some not-bad advice from careers advisers who have the time and have the knowledge to provide advice on different pathways,” she said.
“However, even with those schools we find that it’s pretty much concentrated on ATAR [Australian Tertiary Admission Rank], and if you’re not ATAR they’re pushing you to VET pathways.”
But she said in low socio-economic or rural areas, a careers advisory position was generally left to a “really dedicated teacher who’s either put their hand up or been volunteered”.
“So what we’ve found in this study is they’re generally struggling because they’re trying to fit it in with their day job because they don’t have the knowledge, they don’t have the resources and it’s actually a really complex minefield and each state is different as to the different pathways you have to tertiary education to university or to TAFE or some other mode of study,” she said.
