Fascinating map of the future

This is a map on a wall at school. Marked are all the places that the seniors who graduated from the Christian Academy in Japan in June planned to be going after high school. You can see that most of them went to North America or stayed in Japan. Our son is definitely in the minority.

You can see on the school profile here, that the school has 29 nationalities amongst its students. It is interesting that even many of the non-US students go to North America for college.

Another point of note from a non-American perspective is that no degrees are mentioned here. It is yet another point of the American system that I don't understand. In Australia you aim for a degree, not necessarily a university. So I went straight into Bachelor of Occupational Therapy, and that is what I would tell people if I were asked what I was going to do (of course, I could only answer with certainty about a month before uni started, not months before I graduated, like many US-bound students). Ask an American year twelve student what they're doing after graduation and they'll say something like, "Going to Biola." Assuming, often, that you'll know where that is. They rarely mention what degree they're aiming for. That question confuses, instead the correct question seems to be, "What will you major in?"

I guess by the time we've been here a couple more decades I might understand better . . . but for the meantime, I'm happy to be in the minority and with a son heading into a tertiary system that I've got a better grasp on.

And I love this map!