Why Is University Education Important Beyond Getting a Job? A High School Counselor’s Perspective
Last Tuesday, 7 p.m., the last parent conference of the night, my back ached from hunching over folding tables all day, and my half-decaf latte had gone cold, the sticker on the side misspelled my name as Jen. Mrs. Henderson sat down across from me, pulled out her phone, and showed me a photo of her 18-year-old son Liam leaning against a custom cedar deck he’d built for their backyard last summer.
“He’s got a full apprenticeship offer with Miller Construction down on Main,” she said, twisting her silver wedding band around her finger. “Starts in August, pays $20 an hour, benefits after six months. Everyone keeps telling him he needs to go to university, but why? He already has a job that’ll pay more than most four-year grads make right out of school. What else is it even for?”
I didn’t give her a big speech. I just told her about Javi, who sat in that same folding chair 10 years earlier. Javi’s dad was a union electrician, had a spot for him on his crew the day he graduated high school, no degree required. But Javi had been bugging me for months about why the old textile mill on the edge of town closed, why half his dad’s friends lost their pensions when the company packed up and left. So he enrolled at the state university 45 minutes away, majored in sociology, worked part-time at the campus hardware store to cover tuition, and shared a dorm with three guys he’d never have met growing up in our small 3,000-person town: one from a wealthy Chicago suburb, one from Kenya who’d moved to the U.S. for school.
I hadn’t heard from Javi in years when he stopped by my office last spring. He’s got his own electrical crew now, makes close to $90k a year, and he still doesn’t use his sociology degree for anything related to his job—he wires new construction homes, doesn’t write research papers or do policy work. But he told me that before university, he’d never had a real conversation with anyone who didn’t grow up going to his church, didn’t look like him, didn’t repeat the same lines about immigration he heard at every family cookout. In his second year, he had a group project on housing insecurity, and his partner was a girl whose parents were undocumented construction workers. She told him how her dad fell off a ladder on a job site, broke his ankle, and never went to the doctor because he was scared he’d be deported. That conversation, Javi said, changed how he shows up to work every day. Now he’s the union steward for his local, he set up a free pop-up health clinic for workers without documentation, and he pushes for extra safety training translated into Spanish for all new hires. None of that is in his job description. He didn’t learn it in trade school, and he didn’t learn it growing up here. He learned it at university, just by being around different people and learning to ask questions instead of repeating what he’d always been told.
I also told her about Mia, who graduated five years ago, majored in English, and now runs her own dog grooming business out of her garage. She doesn’t need a degree to wash dogs or clip nails, but she told me last Christmas that the most useful thing she got from university was learning how to manage her own time. Growing up, her mom reminded her to do homework, her teachers gave her weekly deadlines. At university, no one checked if she showed up to lecture, no one reminded her when her final paper was due. She had to figure out how to schedule her work, when to take time off, how to get a paper done even when she’d rather hang out with friends. That’s exactly the skill she needs to run her own business now—no one tells her when to order shampoo, when to book appointments, when to send invoices. She already knows how to do that. She also wrote 10-page papers every other week, so writing clear social media posts to get new clients or drafting simple service contracts feels easy, not overwhelming.
I don’t push university on every kid. If Liam wants to jump straight into the apprenticeship, that’s a great, solid path. But what I see most days is that parents only ever talk about university as a stepping stone to a job. That’s the first and last thing we mention. So after we talked for 15 minutes, I gave Mrs. Henderson three small, concrete things she can do this week when she talks about this with Liam, no big pressure speech needed. First, ask him what’s one thing he’s curious about that he doesn’t get to learn about now that he could explore in college—it could be anything from botany to how to make video games to poetry. Second, ask him what kind of people he wishes he knew more about that he doesn’t get to meet around here. Third, ask him what he’d do with four years if he didn’t have to worry about getting a job at the end.
I’m a parent too, my oldest is a sophomore at university right now, and he still doesn’t know what job he wants after he graduates. I don’t bug him about it. I’m glad he’s there right now, getting four years to mess around, figure out what he likes and what he doesn’t, learn how to compromise with a roommate who leaves dirty dishes in the sink, learn how to fix a bike from a friend who grew up doing that, learn how to ask for help when he’s stuck. Those are things you can learn anywhere, sure, but university gives you a structured low-stakes space to learn them before you have a full-time job and a mortgage and all the other responsibilities that don’t leave much room to experiment.
Mrs. Henderson left my office that night, tucking the slip of paper with those three questions into her purse. Last I heard, Liam applied to part-time classes at the local community college, starting this fall, while he does his apprenticeship. He doesn’t know if he’ll finish a full degree, he doesn’t know if he’ll ever use it for his job. But he said he wants to learn more about business accounting, so if he ever opens his own contracting company someday, he’ll know how to handle the books. It’s too early to tell if it’ll be worth it for him, one way or the other. But it’s nice to see the conversation go beyond just “do you have a job lined up” to “what do you want out of your life, and how can this help you get there.”
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