What Do You Think About University? A Parent’s Honest Take on the College Question
It was a Tuesday night in March, and the kitchen still smelled faintly of garlic bread. My son, a junior in high school, was sliding the last few penne noodles around his plate instead of eating them. He had that look—the one that says he’s about to say something he’s been turning over in his head for a while.
“Mom,” he said, “do you think university is actually worth it?”
This wasn’t a new question. It had been floating around our house since the first college brochure arrived in the mail, addressed to him. But usually it came out as part of a conversation about grades or tuition or the SAT prep course his friends were all signing up for. This time it felt different. He wasn’t asking what the statistics said or what I thought he should do. He was asking me something quieter than that.
“What are you really asking?” I said, because I’m a parent and I can’t help myself.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just see everyone talking about getting in, like that’s the whole point. But nobody talks about what happens after. And I don’t even know what I’d study. So why would I go four years to figure that out and go into debt?”
During my own senior year of high school, I remember sitting in a stale-smelling computer lab and filling out applications because that’s what we did. I picked a major based on a brochure with a girl hiking on the cover. I showed up, got lost in lecture halls, and eventually switched majors twice. The decade after graduation was a scramble of part-time jobs and figuring out what I actually wanted. Looking back, I can’t say those four years were wasted. But I also can’t say I’d do it the same way again.
He didn’t want a speech. He wanted to have a conversation. So I told him a bit of that— the boring parts, not the nostalgic version. I told him about sitting in a general education psychology course at 8 a.m., wondering why the university had required it, and then, six years later, realizing how much that class actually helped me run a team at work. I also told him about the courses I skipped. I wanted to be honest with him.
Here is what I wish someone had told me back in that computer lab: you don’t have to have a reason for everything.
We, as parents, get really attached to the idea that a degree is the thing that opens certain doors. And that’s still true to a degree. But I’ve seen plenty of kids in my classroom over the years who went straight to trades, started working in their family’s business, or took time off to work and travel. Some of them eventually went to community college. They’re not missing some magical key to adulthood. They’re just taking a different staircase.
What I’ve come to believe is that university is not a magic switch. It’s more like a gym membership. You only get the benefit if you actually go, use the equipment, and ask the trainer for help when you’re lost. That’s not something I could drill into my son’s head. I had to show him.
Over the next few weeks, instead of pushing applications, I started asking him different kinds of questions. Not the dreaded, “so what are you going to major in?” but things like, “If you could sit in a room with a stranger and just ask them questions about their job for two hours, what would that person be doing?” He didn’t have an answer, and that was fine. We were practicing a different way of thinking.
The more I reflected, the more I remembered my own uncertainty. When I was seventeen, I thought I was supposed to have a five-year plan. Having a plan felt about as comfortable as shoes that are slightly too small. The thing that actually helped me was talking to people—uncles, friends of my parents, my best friend’s mom who worked in a hospital. Not about careers, but about their actual days.
I tried that with my son too. “Let’s go grab dinner with your aunt Nat,” I said one evening. Aunt Nat runs a small landscaping business. No degree, and she’s doing better than most of my colleagues from college. We sat around a table at a Thai place, and my son asked her if she missed having a more traditional path. She looked surprised. “Not really,” she said. “I’d rather be the one setting the schedule. There’s no rulebook anyway.”
He still asks questions. He still isn’t sure. Some of his friends are already dreaming of dorm rooms and football games. My son talks about the cost of textbooks like a retiree comparing insurance plans. It makes me laugh, because it shows he’s paying attention.
We dug into some numbers one evening after dinner. Not in a big lecture-y way, just side by side looking at the net price calculator on a few college websites. He saw the difference between a private school and the state university a half hour away. He noticed how much a two-year college would cost. My husband and I talked about what we could realistically contribute, and we let that number speak for itself. That was the moment I think it clicked for him. The decision stopped being abstract.
Some things in those conversations have started to become clearer. He mentioned an interest in paramedicine. A friend of ours in the field has an EMT certification and works while studying part-time. That opened up a whole new way for him to think about training and education. We found out that our local community college has a program where he could take prerequisites without committing to a full university yet. We also looked at degree completion rates, which sounded boring at first, until we saw that those numbers tell you more than any brochure.
Now, we’re in a quieter stage. Not comfortable exactly, but no longer tense. He hasn’t decided anything. Some days I think he’ll end up at the state school. Other days I can imagine him becoming a paramedic, coming home at the end of a long shift, and loving that the work is real and immediate.
What keeps coming back to me is a conversation I had with a wise colleague when my son was small. I was worried about milestone development and whether he’d learn to read in time. She told me, “Your job isn’t to get him to the end of the path, it’s to teach him how to walk on loose gravel.” That feels like the right metaphor for this university question too.
If I could boil down what I think about university, it would be this: it’s not a promise. It’s an option. It comes with opportunities, but also a price tag and a time commitment that shouldn’t be guilt-tripped onto an eighteen-year-old who is still figuring out which way he wants to go. What I can do as a parent isn’t to sell him on the dream that a degree guarantees success, or scare him with the specter of a lifetime of retail schedules. It’s to help him look at the basic questions—time, money, daily rhythm, whether a certain campus feels boring or like a beginning—and let him draft his own answer.
The other day, out of nowhere, my son said, “I don’t have to decide now, right? Like, I could just take one class next semester and see.”
I told him that’s exactly what he could do. And there’s something about that phrase—one class—that feels so much more manageable than the word “university.” I think we forget that sometimes. A university is not a single all-or-nothing decision. It’s a series of small attempts, one class, one credit, one semester at a time. Or it’s a pause. Or it’s a different path entirely.
We still don’t know which one he’ll choose. The brochure pile sits on the corner of his desk, a little dog-eared from being moved around. His high school guidance counselor sent him a text asking about an upcoming college fair. I saw him reading it, then locking his phone and going to find a snack.
And that was it. No big moment. Just a kid still thinking about it, and me standing nearby, trying to be more useful than the brochure. And maybe that’s enough.
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