Part of me likes it. (Part of me is irritated.)
The goal of this isn't the kid. It's the parents. Because what kids know is usually just what family tells them; what they learn from friends is often what the friends' families tell them. Combined with a lot of poorly understood information from tv shows and the internet.
Even in high school a lot of kids have no clue what college is about. They only know the jobs they've seen, and they have a donut hole the size of the Milky Way in their set of possible expectations.
They can work for Walmart, they can work in landscaping, in construction--in short, they can work in the kinds of jobs they see in "their community." Or they can be in the NFL, NBA, or whatever the professional soccer league is called. Some have fuzzy ideas of what a lawyer or CEO may do, some may say they could be an "engineer," but have no idea what it takes to get there besides "school" and "connections." And many think universities and colleges don't want people of color and discriminate against them in applications. Check "Latino" and they toss your file on account of it. This reflects what the parents "know."
That was my white working-class childhood. "Engineer" was a single job description. You were or weren't "an engineer." And engineers all used science, so a scientist was a kind of engineer. My parents decided I'd be an "engineer" when I heard them refer to them with respect and I said I wanted to be "an engineer." The only engineer I knew anything about was the engineer on a train. Hey--he's an engineer, right? Because that's the only thing my parents could teach me. Or my friends' parents, through my friends. My family's income was strictly middle class. Their background was strictly working class. High school and GED, 40-hour/wk semi-skilled job, time and a half overtime.
The middle-class-educated kids I know have a wide range of job possibilities they know about. They have parents or relatives that went to college. They know that there are chemical engineers, and some work in the petroleum industry, some design pipes, others design manufacturing processes for pharmaceuticals, some work on computer equipment or design computer software, others do other things. And a railroad "engineer" isn't the same thing as a civil or mechanical engineer.
They also know there are jobs they've never heard about in school. They know that classes of jobs they know about have a lot of variation; they suspect that the same is true for other classes. They don't know a psychologist? Fine--they still are fairly sure there are different kinds of psychologists. I've run into a 10th grader that wanted to be a school district reading diagnostician, which the very low SES kids redefined as either "doctor" or "teacher," depending upon how the 10th-grader explained it. But they didn't want to go to medical school or be a teacher. They'd never taken psychology, and the only psychologist they'd ever heard of was on tv shows. The diagnostician didn't work with the criminally insane, so he wasn't a psychologist.
Some kids' universes are too small for them to have a wide range of careers to consider, or to willingly accept exposure to a range of disciplines that might, just might, be alluring. Others have unreasonable expectations or ideas. I've had kids who said "I want to be a doctor, why do I have to take any science except biology?" "I want to go into business, I don't need to know any math."
Had one student who wanted to be a landscape designer. "Why should I learn anything about soil and runoff?" Oh, really? She thought it was all about just picking out pretty flowers. The idea that clay and loam were different, that drainage might matter, that if a yard is experiencing slump it'll trash the nice retaining wall ... She couldn't figure out how it mattered. Until she had to do a project looking at training requirements for landscape design certification and what wasn't all pretty flowers and nice shade trees.
The most interesting was one kid who assured me that her cousin whatever based on insider knowledge from her husband's aunt something-or-other showed her how to become a doctor quick: Go to a community college, become a certified nurse; work for a year, then go through a special admissions program at medical schools that fast-tracks you to being a doctor in one year, without residency (since they accept your year's experience as a certified nurse). You'd be a full MD at that point. Somewhere in there I think "nurse practitioner" was the original claim, but things got dumbed down and garbled. But this was enough "evidence" for the student, a high school senior, to declare she'd be a doctor within 4 years and it was okay if she failed my class.
While thinking of education as primarily a series of checklists necessary to score a decent job is a horrible, horrible thing, for some kids that never learned to like learning money is the best motivation. Having them get a series of possible jobs in mind fairly early on, say, by 9th grade, is great. Even if they change their minds later. It's better than getting to your senior year and realizing you should have paid attention and have remedial classes at the local community college. One girl came back to my class for help in chemistry. She was 19 and taking high school chemistry again in community college. "It's the same thing Mrs. __________ tried to teach us. This time I'm going to learn it." Too bad it held her back a year and cost her not just the price of community college but what she'd be earning for that first year after graduation.
The idea isn't just checklists, although that horrible "monitor your test scores" crap gets pitched in. It's to expand the range of career choices, to get them thinking that maybe, just maybe colleges do want people like them. "Why do I need to know this?" is a mantra for high school students who'd rather look at pretty dress pictures on the net, watch video clips of football games or play games on their phones. Parents need to have decent goals for their kids--usually the kids' ignorance starts in the home. They need to know that there *are* scholarships. And parents need to wake up to this early, because the best predictor of high school success is middle school success, and that depends largely on home life, home expectations, and what's learned before middle school. (EC programs' benefits largely peter out by middle school, swamped by home life.) It takes years to change the parents' expectations, and if you start in middle school, by the time the parents and teachers are in sync with expectations the high schoolers are in full-throttle rebel mode and want to listen to neither.
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