Did Your Degree Shape You? A Parent’s Honest Take on College and Identity
My son was digging through the storage box in the garage, hunting for an old HDMI cable, when he pulled out the black cardboard folder. “What’s this?” he asked, flipping it open. Inside was my bachelor’s degree in English Literature, issued fourteen years ago, with my name printed in an elegant serif font that felt like it belonged to someone else.
“What did you study?” he asked.
“English Literature,” I said.
He looked at the paper, then at me, then back at the paper. “What do you do with that?”
I laughed because I remember asking my own father the exact same question when I declared my major. He had nodded slowly, the way you nod when you’re not sure whether to be proud or worried, and said, “Well, you’ll figure something out.” He was right, but the figuring took a while and wasn’t linear.
What I remember most about my degree is not the reading list or the lecture halls. It’s the seminar discussions where I said something confidently incorrect and a professor gently took it apart in front of eight other students. It’s the 3 a.m. essays written with a desperate, blurry focus that taught me more about pacing and revision than any lesson on style. It’s the strange pride of finishing a book I hated because the argument in it was worth understanding anyway.
For years, whenever people asked what my degree was in, I would add a defensive little laugh. “English, so I’m qualified to make coffee and argue about symbolism.” It was a joke, but it covered a real belief that my degree hadn’t done much for me. My job was in project management. Nothing in my coursework ever once mentioned Gantt charts or stakeholder meetings. I could have learned what I do in my job in about six months of on-the-job training, and plenty of people in my office did exactly that.
And yet.
Last week, my son had to write a persuasive essay for his seventh-grade social studies class. He was stuck on the introduction, staring at his Chromebook like the screen had personally offended him. I sat down next to him and asked what he was trying to argue. “That school dress codes are unfair,” he said. “But I don’t know how to start.”
We talked through it for a while. I didn’t give him a topic sentence or tell him what to write. Instead, I asked questions: what’s the strongest reason you have? Who would disagree with you, and what would they say? If you could only keep one piece of evidence, which would it be? He wrote a terrible first paragraph. Then a slightly less terrible second one. I watched him delete a sentence he had worked hard on because he realized it didn’t actually support his point. That’s not a skill any career counselor lists on a degree outcomes chart, but it’s the whole game.
That moment made me think about what my degree actually did for me. It didn’t give me a profession. It gave me practice. Practice in sitting with something uncomfortable and not walking away. Practice in having my assumptions dismantled and learning to rebuild them. Practice in the unglamorous, daily act of putting words in order until they say what I mean. Those are not things you can put on a resume, but they are things I use every single day, mostly without noticing.
When I think about my son’s future, I worry about this. Not whether he’ll get into a good college, but whether he’ll treat it as a transaction—four years, a piece of paper, a job at the end. I see that mindset in a lot of the parents around me, and honestly, I recognize it in myself sometimes. We talk about college the way people talk about buying a reliable car. You put in money and time, and you get out something that gets you where you need to go.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting your education to be useful. But usefulness gets defined too narrowly, and kids know when we’re reducing their education to a price tag.
My neighbor’s daughter is a high school junior who wants to study philosophy. Her mother told me, not unkindly, that she’s trying to “steer her toward something practical.” I didn’t say much at the time. But later I thought about all the philosophy majors I know, and it’s remarkable how many of them ended up in law or consulting or product design—not because their degree gave them a job, but because the degree taught them how to take apart an argument and build a better one. That’s a skill you can hang a career on, if you know where to look.
I’m not going to tell my son that the right major is the one he’s passionate about, because that’s not entirely true either. Some passions are hobbies, and some hobbies should stay hobbies. But I am going to tell him that the value of a degree isn’t just in what it prepares you to do. It’s in the person it has time to let you become.
That sounds grander than I mean it. The truth is more ordinary. My degree shaped me the way any long, sustained effort shapes a person: slowly, unevenly, and in ways I didn’t understand until years later. It didn’t give me a calling. It gave me a method. It gave me the odd, unglamorous confidence that comes from having written a forty-page thesis badly and then rewritten it until it was half decent. It gave me the ability to read a dense legal document or a school board policy without my eyes glazing over, which is a more valuable life skill than anyone admits.
The diploma is still in the garage. My son knows what it is now. When he asked me what you do with an English Literature degree, I gave him the honest answer: “You use it to think clearly, and to say what you mean, and to not give up when the first draft is bad. And you use it to learn everything else.” He shrugged and went back to looking for the HDMI cable. That’s fine. He doesn’t need to get it yet.
I don’t know if my son will go to university or what he’ll study if he does. I don’t know if the whole credential system will look the same by the time he’s finishing high school. I suspect it will change, and maybe that’s a good thing. But whatever happens, I hope he ends up with more than a piece of paper. I hope he ends up with the kinds of things I got from my degree: the ability to change his mind, the patience to sit with a hard question, and the willingness to delete a sentence that isn’t working and write a better one.
That last one alone is worth the tuition.
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