Educational institutions have arguably one of the highest responsibilities in a society, one that directly affects its present and its future. Shaping the young and inexperienced minds of today to become rational, creative and prudent individuals is a gargantuan task, given that the young minds that enter educational institutions are diverse in almost every facet of life. Though institutions should assist these students to choose a career path based on their individual traits, this assistance should only be of the encouraging kind and not otherwise. If a student has thoroughly made up their mind to pursue a field of study that is to their liking, it would be counterproductive to dissuade them from fulfilling that goal.

Firstly, the author does not define what it means to be unlikely to succeed. What parameters are we measuring one’s success on? To one, success could mean monetary gains, to another it could be public recognition, to a third it could be the satisfaction of serving a greater good. Who can judge whether an industrialist who has amassed billions of wealth and assets is more successful than a scientist who discovered the cure to a contagious disease? Is a doctor working in war-struck regions to selflessly serve helpless refugees and soldiers with little to no facilities in hand, any less successful than an illustrious surgeon comfortably placed in a metropolitan hospital with state-of-the-art equipment at their disposal? Success is immeasurable as it is highly subjective, and only an individual can determine their standard for it.

Secondly, the author of the argument seems to assume that the prescience of educational institutions in predicting students’ success would be near flawless. As evident in history, humans have an unbreakable tenacity to achieve even that which seem impossible. Students begin their journeys towards their careers with this very tenacity and alacrity to face their challenges. One that seems to be struggling today with their university course, could very well be successful tomorrow in its practical application in life. The well-renowned Albert Einstein himself had failed in school, yet presently not a single student is unaware of him and his numerous contributions towards science. Determining one’s likelihood of success from their progress in a college or school course might be deleterious. In many cases, institutional courses are highly theoretical in nature and do not teach the student how to apply this theory in real-life scenarios. This stifles the student’s knowledge in many ways, and should not be the only assessment of their skills in a particular field. Furthermore, the path to success is differently traced for every individual – someone’s might be straightforward and short, others might have to traverse long and winding roads till they meet their destination. An educational institution has the responsibility to lead all its students to the finish line that they have chosen for themselves, no matter how the path to it might appear.

Lastly, dissuading students from possibly unpropitious careers would only lead to stifling their creative thinking, coddling them by preventing them from tackling challenges that may mirror much of the challenges they could face in the future, and habituate them to an effortless and worry-free way of living, which is deleterious to their growth as an individual and might leave them unprepared for other, even personal, hurdles of their future. Failure is the best teacher, and students must learn to accept it graciously and learn from their errors instead of avoiding it and taking the easy route. Witnessing this failure could help them achieve even greater heights of success.

It takes significant pressure for a piece of coal to become a diamond. As we don’t write off the ability of that ordinary coal to transform into a brilliant piece of glowing value, educational institutions should similarly not be dismissive of the abilities of young students at their nascent levels of knowledge to be successful in their fields of choice but instead prop them up with the right tools to touch the heights they wish to experience.