Readiness for educational choice in different groups of university students: toward a problem statement

The article analyzes the problem of readiness for educational choice in domestic and foreign publications. Foreign scholars, studying the readiness to choose, take as a basis the students' ideas about careers, professions, a particular form of education. Domestic scholars, in turn, are trying to construct the personal experience of students and determine individual strategies of educational choice. The empirical study of socio-demographic factors of readiness for educational choice involved students of all undergraduate courses of Kemerovo State University. The sample size is 251 people, and the average age of the participants is 19.5 years old. Areas of study for students: social sciences, natural sciences, technical sciences, pedagogical sciences. The following methods were selected for the work: the “Life-Purpose Orientations” test by D.A. Leontiev, the “Subjective Quality of Choice” method by D.A. Leontiev et al, the “Professional Readiness” method by A.P. Chernyavskaya and a questionnaire to analyze demographic characteristics: gender, age, course of study and direction of training. Statistical processing by means of analysis of variance revealed the influence of gender, course of study, and field of study on both the characteristics of educational choice and the overall meaningfulness of students’ lives.