Is Hyperspecialization a Problem?

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I am at the end of my undergraduate career, will enter the workforce for a few years, and then plan to get my masters. I don't know what I will get my masters in, but therein lies the problem. My undergrad work is setting me up for a decent career in the short-run, and I can probably get into a good preprofessional program (MDA, law school, etc). At present, though, I am thinking I want a social science research degree, as it touches on other areas I have become interested in. I see those degrees as more valuable in the workforce than preprofessional degrees because they are more flexible.

My undergrad work means I can't get into a good research program unless I go back to school, and all because I failed to take a few courses. What disturbs me the most, however, is that our Western society is locking people into a set career path at a younger and younger age.

Let me use my nascent career as an example. I am a writer, and I like creative writing. I also have done writing work for financial executives, and will probably do the same starting soon. The pay is average, but the work is fascinating and the connections are outstanding.

At the same time, I fear I couldn't get work writing anything other than finance soon, simply because that's my reputation as a writer. What if I wanted to write about water issues on the West coast? What if I wanted to publish a novel? What if I wanted to stop writing altogether, and become a doctor?

Any radical career change would be hard because it takes an investment in time and money. More importantly, lots of social pressures (increasing salary, conservative family and friends' attitudes, etc) talk us out of change. All of these limitations were fine fifty years ago, when both educational opportunities and available career paths were pretty limited. Nowadays, our knowledge economy has exploded the field of potential careers. And yet lots of things in society say we must chose a career by 18, when we go to college.

I understand my choices in life are hard to relate to, but I think the concept of hyperspecialization is not. Are we under pressure to hyperspecialize at a younger and younger age? Is there a way we can reverse the affects of this trend? For instance, I wonder if more people should go back to school in their thirties or forties, the youngest that most people have a clear idea of what they want to do in life.

That of course is the catch these days, in every field.

Not much you can do but walk it - the culture has drifted that way and we get caught in the current. I could never have gotten a job teaching German once I had a CV listing me as teaching Pau Donq.

Back even in the forties it was not so - I knew a man, now dead, who got a job for which he had no formal qualifications just by saying wityh conviction he could do it, and he did it.

But paper rules our lives, and if you had certificates as a doctor AND a lawyer they would look askance at you for not being singleminded.