The Problem Isn't Computer Science. It's Why Students Choose It.
- Dr Sp Mishra
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Over the past few weeks, I counselled three young engineering graduates. Their stories were different. Their outcomes were different. Yet by the end of each conversation, I found myself circling back to the same uncomfortable question.
How many students actually choose their careers and how many simply arrive at them?
Three Conversations I Can't Stop Thinking About
The first student was remarkably honest.
"I chose engineering because everyone around me was doing it. My elder sister had done it too."
He never pretended that Computer Science was his passion. Over the next four years, he struggled continuously, accumulating more than a dozen backlogs before eventually clearing them and earning his degree. But in our session, he said one thing without hesitation: "I don't want a career in Computer Science."
The degree was complete. The journey, however, had never really begun.
The second student, from Odisha, finished his Computer Science degree in 2025. His CGPA was too low to qualify for campus placements, and a year on, he is still searching for his first job. Like many students, he had believed the degree itself would lead to employment. Instead, he discovered that the real competition only starts after graduation.
The third student looked, on paper, like a success story. He had completed Computer Science with a specialization in Cyber Security and secured a remote job with a Dubai-based company while working from Hyderabad.
But another story emerged in conversation. He had never liked Mathematics in school. His parents had pushed him toward the PCM stream and then Computer Science because it seemed like the safest, most rewarding option. A year into a remote-first role with little mentoring and almost no interaction with colleagues, he felt disconnected from both his work and his profession.
He wasn't struggling to find a job. He was struggling to find meaning in it.
Looking Beyond Three Individual Stories
At first, these seemed like three unrelated cases: one student struggled academically, one struggled to enter the job market, and one struggled after entering it.
But reflecting on the conversations, I noticed something they all shared.
None of them had truly chosen Computer Science. They had simply arrived there. One followed family. Another followed the perceived value of the degree. The third followed parental expectations.
Not one of them said, "I chose this because I love solving software problems." That sentence was missing from all three conversations and its absence says a great deal.
When Students Don't Own Their Decisions
The most striking common thread wasn't academic performance or employment outcomes. It was ownership.
In every case, the decision about the course and college had largely been made by parents, elders, or circumstance. This is where many career journeys quietly start to drift.
Parents should absolutely play an active role in career decisions they bring wisdom, life experience, financial perspective, and emotional support. But there's a real difference between guiding a decision and owning it. When parents own the decision, students can end up as passengers in their own careers. And when the inevitable challenges arrive, it becomes easy to say:
"My parents wanted me to do engineering." "My father insisted on Computer Science." "Everyone else was doing it."
These aren't excuses. They're signs that the student never developed psychological ownership of the journey and ownership matters because it shapes how we respond to difficulty. Students who choose a path for themselves are more likely to persist through setbacks, ask for help, and keep improving, because the struggle is part of a goal they personally embraced. Students who inherit someone else's decision often find that same resilience harder to access, simply because the destination was never truly theirs.
Choosing a Course Is Not the Same as Choosing a Career
This may be one of the biggest misconceptions in Indian education: choosing Computer Science isn't simply choosing a four-year degree. It's choosing a professional life that could span the next thirty or forty years.
Programming isn't just about high salaries or placement statistics. It involves continuous learning, abstract thinking, debugging complex problems, adapting to new technologies, and often long stretches of independent work. Some people genuinely enjoy that. Others don't and neither response is right or wrong. The mistake is assuming a popular career is automatically the right career for every student.
The Question We Should Be Asking
Parents often ask me, "Which branch has the best placements?"
It's an understandable question. But perhaps the more important one is:
"Which kind of work will my son or daughter still enjoy doing ten years from now?"
The first question is about today's market. The second is about tomorrow's life. Good career decisions need to account for both.
A Better Way to Make Career Decisions
Over the years, my approach to career counselling has become simpler: a career decision should involve three participants the student, the parents, and the career counsellor. But only one of them should ultimately own the decision: the student.
Parents should guide. Counsellors should inform. Students should decide not because eighteen-year-olds have all the answers, but because they're the ones who will live with the consequences, learn from the mistakes, celebrate the successes, and build a life around that decision.
Ownership doesn't guarantee success. But without it, success often feels borrowed, and failure feels inherited.
A Final Reflection
Computer Science isn't the problem. It remains one of the world's most exciting and influential professions.
The real problem begins much earlier when students choose a course without first understanding themselves, when popularity replaces purpose, when social trends replace self-awareness, and when families make career decisions for students instead of with them.
The most successful professionals aren't always the ones who chose the most fashionable careers. They're the ones who chose careers that fit who they are.
That's a conversation worth having long before college admissions begin.
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If you or your child are weighing a career or course decision and want a second perspective, India Career Centre's counsellors are here to help you think it through together.
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