What Do You Think About University? How to Answer When Your Teen Asks
The question came on a Saturday morning, somewhere between toast crumbs and the dog scratching at the back door. My daughter was at the kitchen table, laptop open to a university prospectus. She hadn’t spoken in a while. Then she looked up and said, “What do you think about university?”
I poured another coffee to buy time. It’s one of those questions that sounds simple but isn’t. She’s in Year Twelve, predicted grades are fine, and she’s been to the open days with her friends. But I could tell she wasn’t asking for a brochure answer. She was asking something bigger, and she wasn’t sure how to say it.
So I said the honest thing: “I don’t really know what I think. Why do you ask?”
She pushed a student finance leaflet aside. “Everyone says it’s the best years of your life. But what if I pick wrong and waste three years?”
I sat down. The radiator clicked in the corner. The dog gave up on crumbs and lay down by the cupboard.
What I thought about was my own first term at university. I had chosen my course because a teacher told me I was good at essays. I arrived in October with a suitcase and a feeling I had made a terrible mistake. I sat in lectures taking notes I didn’t understand. I called home every Sunday, pretending I was fine. I nearly transferred in January.
By March, things had shifted. Not dramatically. I took an elective I knew nothing about—urban history—because the room was near the cafe. The lecturer took us on a walking tour and showed us how to read a building: which door was original, which window had been replaced, what the brickwork said about who could afford to live there. It was the first time someone talked about learning as something you do with your eyes and feet, not just your pen. That wasn’t a magical moment where everything clicked. But it taught me that a university education can surprise you, and that surprise is not something you can plan for.
I didn’t tell my daughter all of that at once. I told her a short version. Then I asked her what she was actually worried about.
This is the part I think most parents miss. When a teenager asks what you think about university, they often have a specific fear underneath. They might be worried they’ll be lonely. They might be worried about money. They might be worried they’re only going because everyone else is. Or they might be worried that they’re the only person in Year Twelve who isn’t sure at all.
If we answer with our own university story, we close the door. We talk, they listen, and the real question doesn’t come out.
So the practical thing to do first is just to ask a plain question: “What part feels uncertain?” Then wait. Don’t fill the space. Let them say it badly. My daughter said she was worried about choosing a subject she’d be stuck with. “I don’t even know what I like enough to study it for three years,” she said. “Everyone else seems to have a plan.” That was the real thing. It wasn’t about accommodation or Freshers’ Week. It was about feeling behind.
We talked about separating three things that usually get bundled together: university as a place to learn, university as a social experience, and university as a piece of paper that helps you get a job. They don’t have to all line up. Some people go to uni for the piece of paper and hate every lecture. Some people fall in love with a subject and never think about careers. Some people barely go to classes and spend all their time in a drama society, and that ends up being exactly what they needed. All of those are legitimate, but they’re different decisions.
I told her she didn’t have to decide what she wanted out of university. She just had to decide what she wanted out of the next two or three years. That felt manageable to her, I think, because it was a smaller question.
The other thing I did was stop defending university. I didn’t realise I was doing it until later that week. We were driving home from school and she mentioned that her friend’s older sister had started an accounting apprenticeship. “She seems more sorted than anyone at school,” my daughter said. “She gets paid, she has her own flat, and she’s not drowning in essays.”
I heard myself say, “But university gives you time to figure things out. You can’t get that back.”
She went quiet. And I realised I had made an argument, not an observation. I had turned her friend’s path into a problem. That was my own memory talking, not her best interest.
Here’s what I should have said, and what I did say later: “That does sound sorted. What do you think she might miss out on?” It opened the conversation again. She said, “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But I don’t think I want to work in an office yet.” So she wasn’t rejecting university because she had a better plan. She just wanted someone to tell her it was okay not to have one.
If you’re a parent or teacher in this space, there are a few concrete things that can help beyond asking questions. First, talk about the actual shape of university, not the label. Most teenagers don’t know how degree courses work beyond the UCAS points. They don’t know that first year often doesn’t count toward the final grade, or that you can switch courses in many places, or that modules are negotiable. Just explaining that university is more flexible than school can take a lot of pressure off.
Second, visit a campus on a normal Tuesday, not an open day. Open days are designed to sell. We went to one where the tour guide was upbeat and the accommodation looked like a hotel. My daughter said, “This doesn’t feel real.” She was right. A normal campus—with rain on the pavements, students queuing for cheap coffee, slightly tired buildings—tells a truer story. You don’t have to spend a whole day. Twenty minutes is enough to get a feeling.
Third, help your teenager talk to someone in their early twenties who went down a different path. A cousin doing a trade. A family friend who dropped out. A neighbour who did a degree at thirty. These are often more influential than anything a parent says. It also breaks the binary thinking that you either go to university at eighteen or you’ve somehow missed the boat. People change lanes all the time.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. My daughter hasn’t decided. She has a document on her laptop with two columns: one for universities, one for other options. The “other” column is not empty, which feels like a small victory. She still asks questions, just different ones. Last week she asked, “What did you learn at university that you couldn’t have learned somewhere else?” I thought about it for a long time. I didn’t have a good answer. But I told her the truth: maybe nothing. Maybe it was all experience, not content. She nodded, and I could see her chewing on that.
I don’t know if she’ll go. I don’t know if she should. But I’m learning to sit longer with the question instead of rushing to answer it. “What do you think about university?” deserves more than an opinion. It deserves a conversation that can be reopened, again and again, until the person asking it is sure enough to decide on their own.
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