news
Teen career uncertainty
Indecisive teens more likely to be unemployed
in their early 20s.
M
any teens are unsure about their professional futures.
PISA results from 2006 showed that a fifth of 15-year-old
Australians didn’t know what job they wanted when they
were 30. Other studies suggest a third of adolescents feel this way,
yet they tend to be overlooked by researchers.
Not ANU sociologist Dr Joanna Sikora. She wanted to test the
commonly held belief that career uncertainty is positive, as young
people can take time to figure out what they really want. So, using
data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Youth (LSAY), she
analysed the extent to which uncertainty:
1. persists from adolescence into young adulthood
2. affects the likelihood of obtaining a bachelor’s degree by age 26
Unis escape spy laws
Foreign influence bill amended following lobbying by
universities and their affiliated organisations.
T
he federal government has watered down its proposed
anti-foreign spy legislation after universities claimed
overreach.
The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Bill initially hampered
the ability of researchers to collaborate with overseas counterparts
by requiring registration of these partnerships, universities argued.
If Australian researchers failed to do this, they could have been jailed.
Following intense lobbying by universities and their affiliated
organisations – including Universities Australia and the Go8 –
2
campusreview.com.au
3. predicts expected lifetime earnings, based on occupation held at
age 26.
Sikora’s findings, published in the Australian Journal of Education
(online, 8 June), were largely negative. In her words, they
“support the view of occupational uncertainty as structurally
conditioned and potentially detrimental lack of direction rather
than purposeful role exploration with extended beneficial
consequences”.
“A tendency to lack vocational direction persists from
adolescence into young adulthood,” she wrote. “In line with
arguments made in the USA,