Why Education is the Number 1 Regret in Life
Not speaking up in a meeting, how I styled my hair in high school, failing to accomplish goals- these are regrets. The list can be long and vary on emotional pain levels depending on how deep we want to dig. We are humans, and being human means having experiences which can result in regret. Like fears, we all have them and my bet is it would take you less than 10 seconds to think of a few things that you regret.
While watching Kathryn Schulz’s ted talk “Don’t regret regret” she shared a statistic that rattled me, and I had to dig a little deeper to find out what was going on with what research has shown to be our number one regret in life: Our Education.
The Study
Many studies have been done on regret, yielding similar results about what we regret the most about our lives. Neal J. Roese and Amy Summerville completed a meta-analysis of 11 different regret ranking studies to do the first integrative summary on what American’s regret most. They then set out to determine why we regret certain domains of life more than others. What’s the link?
When we look at our lives and experiences, these are the things that we regret the most- in descending order.
1. Education
2. Career
3. Romance
4. Parenting
5. The Self
6. Leisure
For Americans, education and career make up a whopping 54% of our regrets. More than half of our regrets are a result of our career or our education. What makes us regret these things more intensely?
According to the study, the Opportunity Principle. Areas where we perceive the most opportunity to better our lives create the most regret. Even the definition regret itself speaks to loss of opportunity.
The Opportunity
Today, education can be obtained throughout life and in many different means. With so much open access to information in the form of social media (especially YouTube), new areas of study, online schools, countless articles, and MOOCs all providing opportunities to learn and near instant access to some form of learning. You can always learn something, at any given time. This means we are living in a world where you have the constant opportunity to progress your knowledge. Furthermore, as the study states, education opens many doors for desired life outcomes;
“Education is widely recognized to be a gateway to numerous other valued consequences, from higher income to more challenging career to wider diversity of social contacts. Education is therefore a means to achieving several important ends, and any of these ends gone awry might have been avoided with more education.”
Take Action
More than at any other time in history, we have access to education- which can lead to our desired life outcomes. Analyze your regrets. What’s on the list? What’s a goal that, if left unaccomplished, will result in regret? Write it down.
Get a game plan. The best use of our precious commodity of time is to prevent future regrets in their tracks- that means progression both in education and career. It won’t be comfortable to take action, but that’s where the magic happens. Lucille Ball once said “I’d rather regret the things I have done than regret the things I haven’t” so take a chance on learning something new and getting out of your comfort zone, before you regret it.
Degreed’s mission is to jailbreak the degree. We empower learners by providing a place to track, share, find, and validate all the learning they do. After all, we learn within formal higher education for 2, 4, or 6 years- but we learn outside of formal education for the majority of our lives. We believe all of that learning matters. We’re the new answer to the question “Tell me about your education”.
