Why My Daughter Isn’t Sure About University (and What We Talked About Instead)
The prospectus landed on the kitchen table with a soft thud, and my daughter pushed it aside to make room for her plate. It was a Tuesday in October, and the school had sent home a glossy booklet about university open days. She was seventeen, studying for A-levels, and this was the year everything was supposed to happen.
“I don’t think I want to go,” she said, not looking up from her pasta.
I tried to keep my face still. “Okay,” I said. “Why not?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel like something I actually want to do. It feels like something I’m supposed to want to do.”
I recognised that feeling. I’d felt it myself at her age, except I’d buried it under a pile of UCAS forms and told everyone I was excited. For me, university was what you did if you got the grades. My parents never pushed me, but there was an unspoken assumption that a degree meant a better life. I went because it was the path. I studied English, made friends, learned to live away from home, and honestly, I loved most of it. But looking back, I never once stopped to ask whether I was choosing it or just following the script.
When the school WhatsApp group started humming with messages about personal statements and Russell Group visits, I felt that familiar pull. All those other parents seemed so certain. Their kids were going to be doctors, engineers, lawyers. Mine was sitting at the table pushing a tomato around her plate, telling me she’d rather do an apprenticeship in graphic design.
I didn’t say that to her. I said, “That’s a completely different path.”
She looked at me, waiting.
The truth is, I didn’t know what to do with her uncertainty. My instinct was to argue, to pull out the statistics about graduate earnings and the anxiety about what people would think. But a friend of mine, who’s a secondary school teacher, once told me that the biggest mistake parents make in Year 13 is treating university as the only answer to the question of what to do next. She said that when her students come to her unsure, the worst thing anyone can do is try to convince them to feel differently. What they need is someone to help them explore what their doubts are actually about.
So I took a breath and asked my daughter a different question. Not “what do you want to do with your life,” but “what do you think your week would look like if you didn’t go?”
She thought about it. “I’d get a job,” she said. “Maybe something in design. I’d have money. I’d see my friends who are at home. I’d feel like I’m doing something real.”
“And what would you miss about uni?”
“The parties, maybe,” she admitted. “Living with people my own age. Not living with you.”
I laughed. She smiled a little. It was, I think, the first honest conversation we’d had about the whole thing.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand since that evening. When a teenager says they don’t want to go to university, that isn’t a failure or a rebellion. It’s often a sign that they’re actually thinking — properly thinking — about what kind of life they want. The kids who glide through the application process without a hitch are sometimes just as uncertain; they’ve just learned to hide it better.
The problem is that our entire school system, not to mention the social pressure around it, frames university as the natural finish line. So when a young person questions it, everyone panics. But the question “what do you think about university?” is not actually a question. It’s a prompt for a monologue about why they should go.
I decided I wasn’t going to give her that monologue.
Instead, over the next few weeks, we did some practical things. I can’t say they were planned, but they helped.
First, we stopped talking about “university” as one thing. I asked her to break it down: was it the course she was unsure about? The debt? The leaving home? The pressure of grades? The social side? Once she separated those from each other, it became clearer. She was actually excited about studying design. She was not excited about another three years of essays and lectures. She wanted to learn by doing.
Second, we went to see a campus anyway. Not because I was trying to change her mind, but because I wanted her to have real information instead of vague ideas. It was a mid-size university with a decent art department. We walked around, sat in on a first-year lecture, ate in the cafeteria. It wasn’t as horrible as she’d imagined, and it wasn’t as amazing as I’d remembered. It was just a place. On the drive home, she said, “I could see myself there, but I could also see myself not.”
I told her that was okay. Actually, I said, that’s a good position to be in. Not everyone gets to choose from a place of ambivalence rather than desperation.
The third thing we did was talk to people. Real people, not just school advisors. I reached out to an old colleague who’d trained as a graphic designer through an apprenticeship. She Skyped with my daughter one Saturday morning and showed her what her week looked like: client meetings, sketching, working from home two days a week, a proper salary. It was ordinary, unglamorous, and useful. My daughter’s eyes lit up when she saw the Wacom tablet. She didn’t envу the career; she envied the desk.
We also spoke to a family friend in her fifties who had dropped out of university after a year and later went back when she was thirty. She said the second time was completely different because she knew why she was there. “The worst thing,” she said, “is spending three years doing something because you felt like you should. It’s not the money that breaks you. It’s the feeling that you’ve missed your own life.”
That sentence stayed with me. It made me think about all the ways we push our kids toward decisions before they’re ready — or worse, toward decisions we’ve decided are right. The deadline-heavy pressure of UCAS doesn’t create serious reflection. It creates box-ticking. Some seventeen-year-olds are ready to make that call. Many aren’t, and for those who aren’t, taking a year to work or volunteer or just sit with the question is not a failure. It’s a form of data collection.
One evening, my daughter came into the kitchen while I was making tea. She said she’d been looking at degree apprenticeships in digital design and that there were places at two different companies in the city. She also said she still wanted to apply to one university, just to keep the option open.
“So maybe both?” I said.
“Maybe both,” she agreed.
We didn’t hug or have a movie-ending moment. I just poured the tea and told her that sounded like a plan. I tried not to let her see how relieved I was — not because she’d chosen university, but because she’d stopped treating the decision as a verdict on her intelligence.
It’s the spring term now, and the application is in. She’s still deep in her art portfolio, and she’s also sent off two apprenticeship applications. I have no idea what will happen. She might get an offer and hate it. She might take a job and realise she wants to go back into education. She might, like her dad, spend her twenties figuring it out in messy, non-linear ways.
I used to think my job as a parent was to give her certainty. Now I think it’s to help her get comfortable with the fact that she doesn’t have any yet. That’s not a pipe dream or a platitude. It’s just what this year has been teaching us — slowly, over cold cups of tea, with the prospectus still sitting at the end of the table like a question we no longer need to answer tonight.
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