In a society which is getting more and more utilitarian, universities, which were thought to be the ivory towers above realistic life, are inevitably facing a growing number of realists. One of the most popular ideas supported by them is that university students should base their choice of a field of study on the availability of jobs in that field. This claim has its type of reason, because only by working can people feed themselves and find their own values in the society. If one can not find a job after graduating from the university, the education he or she received would seem useless. However, I do not think that job prospects should be the most important concerning for students to choose their study fields.
Completing the college usually needs at least four years and no one can predict what will happen during this time. Thus, it is highly possible that a field which had masses of jobs four years ago can not bring ideal jobs easily to the graduated students of it now. For example, when I entered the college six years ago, the finance and banking was one of the most popular majors, but today due to the financial crisis, uncountable enterprises and banks have fallen down and it is much more difficult for the students of this major to find jobs than several years ago. Since the society is changing all the time, it is impossible to affirm the availability of jobs in one field will keep unchangeably in the next four years.
Also, in the modern society, actually few jobs need highly professional knowledge, which means that as long as a student has enough ability and receives some training, he or she can be qualified to the job, no matter what the student's major is. I worked as an intern for a newspaper before and I was rather surprised to find out the fact that few journalists in the newspaper had read journalism during their college. They graduated from different kinds of majors but they were doing the same job and they all did quite well. From then on, I realize that the meaning of one's major is not as important as people usually conceive. What really matters is the ability of creative thinking and solving problems. Apparently, these abilities have nothing to do with one's study field and students could develop them consciously when they want, regardless of their fields of study.
Additionally, if one regard the availability of jobs as the only or the most important standard of selecting his or her field of study, it may bring out some averse consequences. First, if a student is not interested in the chosen field (whose possibility can not be neglected）, he or she is unlikely to perform well in that field and a bad performance can easily cause the lost of self-confidence and therefore makes the student lose more interest to the field. Hence, a vicious circle forms and in some severe cases, the student has to drop out from the college-- every year people can read such events from the newspapers. Second, when the rich availability of jobs is the only reason for a student to study in a field, then if he or she can not find an ideal job smoothly, mental imbalance is easily to happen, since there is a distance between the reality and the anticipated goals.
To sum up, I believe that there is no field where no one can find a job while there is no field where everyone can find a perfect job. It is a student's abilities which determines whether he or she can get a job successfully, not his or her study field. There is nothing wrong with taking the availability of jobs into consideration when choosing a field of study, however, students never should treat this factor as the basic standard.