WONG, Michelle Ann Q.

October 8, 2014
2
nd
Year- BA Philosophy 2013-59347
Pretend you are an anthropologist. Explain what values, roles and norms exist in the teenage
subculture of education and business (Group 3).

Scope and Limitations
The study is limited to the Philippines and to the youth, specifically high school students,
college students, and young professionals.

Teenagers and young adults are influenced greatly by mass media. Priorities of the youth
today are most related to popularity and connectivity, as well as their link to the internet/the
digital age. The youth in the Philippines, and even in other countries, pay more and more
attention to their Facebook or other social media/networking accounts using the latest devices
and technology we have. Games done on the streets are now done on apps. People you used to go
outside to talk to, you can now talk to them online. These instances show us much about out
ages technological advancements however, as these advancements were presented to improve
peoples lives by making everything faster, more practical and more convenient, they more or
less play a big role in affecting peoples attitudes, values, etc, especially seen in the youth. The
attitudes, values etc that they attained from or being influenced by technology is being carried on
to our daily living activities.
Since everything nowadays is easy, for instance, talking to people on the other side of the
world instead of mailing letters, or looking for references in the internet instead of going to the
library and read the books, teenagers tend to take things lightly; they tend to want everything to
be convenient. Teenagers than would be more ill-tempered when it comes to the things that they
want and the things they want to achieve. This attitude can affect how teenagers choose their
career paths. People tend to choose courses which lead to jobs with immediate, large returns
once they graduate. More and more teens go into courses they dont really have interest in just to
get jobs with high returns.
Other than the influence of technology and mass media, another large factor that affects
teenage Filipinos decisions regarding their career or course choices would be their parents.
Generally, parents want what they think is best for their children. However parents in East Asian
countries, especially in the Philippines, tend to hold on to their children and try to keep their
children on the course they think is best for them to the point of deciding their childrens future
career paths etc. Children, Filipino teenagers, would go along with this because they would
either have the mind-set that, my parents know what is best so I should do that or they would
feel a sense of debt or utang na loob to their parents for taking care of them. They would then
decide that the least they can do is choose to do what makes them happy.
There are parents who believed in the big-name careers as the only successful ones for
example, being an engineer or a doctor. Parents of older generations tend to direct their children
on everything they think they know about how to get successful and children, as they listen to
their parents and are dependent of them, more often than not, obey. One of the benefits to this
though is to have a sort of guide in the form of your parents, on the career paths you could be
interested in or could be good and successful at. Aside from that, a teen deciding on his career
involves a lot of things like his parents occupational status, financial statues, social status, and
what his parents want from him. There are also the modernized parents who are known to be
more open-minded about things and would then let their children decide what they want to do
and to just accept and support them.
A teenagers schooling from toddler and above affects a teenagers decisions as well. The
environment and crowd the teenager immerses himself in also affects his career choices. School
takes up about 8 hours and sometimes even more of the childs day, every day. The things they
learn from their teachers influence their choices, subconsciously or not. Some schools even set
limits to the teenagers career choices. For example, national science high schools require their
students to take science courses in college and in return the students tuition in the school is
automatically paid off. Thus limits his choices to a particular field. There is also the sub-factor of
peer pressure which plays in the teenagers choices as well.
Some students nowadays tend to pursue a course or kind of education in the classes or
course interesting to them, Teenagers from the current generation most likely chose them
because they wanted it or they are really interested in it.
Another big factor to career decision making is monetary value. While some teenagers
choose their careers based on what they want, others choose career paths because of monetary
reasons. People would choose in-demand courses or careers high in demand because they want
to gain a lot of money because of the high pays. courses with the most demand are Engineering
courses, ITs, and Science courses because these are the ones with high payments, to as high as
40-50,000Php per month (Job Street, 2014; "The top 10 highest paying jobs in the Philippines in
2014"). Other high-paying courses and jobs are computer specializations and business and
accountancy ("Top 5 In-Demand Professions in the Philippines", 2014). High paying jobs for
fresh graduates are those involved in tourism (i.e. Php 20,629 per month), Telecommunications,
Information technology, Hotel management, medical services, Financial services, Law and
education, which all average from 16,000 to 19,000 per month ("The top 10 highest paying jobs
in the Philippines in 2014").
Another monetary reason to choose a certain career or course would be the lack of funds
in the first place. Students would pursue affordable courses instead of going into long careers
like medicine. Another reason would be, they tend to go to 4-year courses which are proven to
have high earnings so that they will have immediate returns, instead of going through 10 years of
undergraduate school and a few more years of specialization in medical school.
Although we now live in a more open or more accepting society, the stereotypical roles
created by society and which still prevails to this day can still affect career choices. There are
still some people in the dividing mind set of hard courses for men and soft courses for
women.
While most of these are the external factors, I just want to add that there are also internal
factors that affect an adolescents career path decision. Internal factors include birth order,
interest in a specific field, skill in a specific field, his gender, etc.
After being affected by all these in their career choices, many people still choose to
continue to study and pursue a masters degree. Why? Nowadays. Companies usually hire
professionals with a masters degree and even immediately give a good, stable position in the
company. This is in the thinking of they need an older, wiser person to handle the job and all
that. Some even study abroad for the better credentials. Applying for Ivy league schools abroad
and coming back would give an invisible advantage because companies would automatically
assume that youre smart enough to graduate from a school abroad.
However there are also those teenagers or young adults that start a business right after
graduation, even during graduation! Starting small, private businesses has become a sort of trend
and is an easy and quick way of getting money as well. And if the country gets too crowded, a lot
of fresh graduates actually work abroad to avoid the countrys high unemployment rate in the
Philippines, low salary and few benefits offered by the companies, and discrimination among
applicants. Companies in the Philippines even have their school biases. Biases towards the big 4
colleges for example (Ateneo de Manila University, University of the Philippines, De La Salle
University, University of Santo Tomas) and so most graduates from lesser known schools often
open their own businesses instead or go abroad to look for better work.
What can we say about all of this? A teenager who needs to decide on his career path first
gathers information from himself as well as around him. He then arranges the information he
receives and sorts them, and finally decides on what career path he should take (Espero, 2010)
based on the factors he sees and are affected off.














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