Should My Teen Go to University? What I Tell Parents Who Aren’t Sure
On a grey Saturday morning, I was stuck in traffic on the way to my daughter’s football practice. She was in the passenger seat, scrolling through her phone, when she said, completely out of nowhere, “I don’t even know why I’m applying to university.”
The car was full of damp boots and the smell of old coffee. I tightened my hands on the wheel and tried to sound calm. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Everyone talks about UCAS like it’s the only thing that matters. But I don’t have a course I love. And I hate writing essays. Why would I spend three years doing something I hate?”
I didn’t have an answer. Not a good one anyway. I said something like, “Well, you don’t have to decide yet,” which was true, but it didn’t feel useful.
I’ve been a parent for eighteen years and a teacher for fifteen. I should have something better to say. The truth is, my thinking about university is far more complicated than the neat line I used to give students: “University opens doors.” It does. But it also closes some, mainly the door to earning money and building work experience while your friends are doing the same.
My daughter is in Year 12. She’s bright enough to go to university. She gets solid grades without much fuss. But she doesn’t light up when she talks about any subject. She lights up when she’s building a small app on her laptop, or when she’s making a website for her friend’s mum’s bakery. She likes solving problems with code. She just doesn’t want to write a personal statement about how an adolescent obsession with Minecraft changed her relationship with humanity.
I said, “What would you do instead?” She didn’t hesitate. She said maybe an apprenticeship in software development. She’d found one online that paid a small salary and included a qualification. She showed me the page. I felt a familiar knot in my stomach. It wasn’t what I had imagined for her. I had imagined the same thing my own parents imagined for me: walking through an old gate, living in a shared house, staying up late talking about books, graduating into a world where a degree meant something.
But that world doesn’t exist anymore. At least not in the same way.
Over the next few weeks, I tried to actually listen instead of rehearsing my opinion. We talked in the kitchen while she ate toast before school. We talked in the car, usually when there was a good song on in the background so the conversation didn’t feel too heavy. I asked her questions I hadn’t thought to ask before: What do you want your day to look like when you’re twenty-two? What kind of things do you want to be good at? What are you willing to be bored with?
That last question mattered more than I expected. She admitted she didn’t want to sit through three years of lectures on topics that felt irrelevant. She wanted to be learning with her hands, building things that actually worked. She wanted to earn money, not because she was greedy, but because she hated the idea of being dependent on us for another five years.
I had to check my own bias. My grandfather, born in a small farming town, once told me that being able to go to university was like climbing a mountain. He never got to go. He saved for years so my dad could go, and my dad saved so I could go. In my family, university is a promise we keep passing forward. It feels like a failure to stop now. But when I looked at my daughter, I realised she wasn’t stopping anything. She was just building a different mountain.
I still didn’t want her to make the decision based on what she saw online. So we made it practical. We did not talk about “potential” or “fulfilment” for a while. We talked about numbers. We looked up degree apprenticeships in her area. We looked at student loan statements from friends whose kids had graduated. We looked at starting salaries for software developers versus, say, history graduates. I know that measures worth in money, and that’s not a great way to think about a life. But it’s also a real thing that keeps people up at night, and pretending it doesn’t matter is something only parents who are wealthy can afford.
We also did something very simple: we visited a university. Not the beautiful old one with the famous library. We went to a newer campus, the kind with glass buildings and a lot of vending machines. We sat in on a first-year computing lecture. It lasted fifty minutes and involved a lot of pseudocode. Afterward, my daughter said, “That wasn’t awful.” But she said it the way you talk about a dentist appointment that didn’t hurt too much. She wasn’t excited. She was just relieved it wasn’t painful.
I told a close friend about this, and she said, “You’re just letting her avoid hard things. University isn’t meant to be exciting. It’s meant to be hard. That’s how you grow.”
There is some truth in that. University absolutely stretches you. It teaches you to manage your own time, to argue a point, to survive lonely weeks in January when no one is checking if you’ve read the reading list. Those are real skills. I would not have the patience to write long reports or the confidence to speak in meetings if I hadn’t been forced to write essays and give seminars. I value those years.
But I also remember staring at a screen in the library at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday, wondering why I was writing about a medieval agricultural economy when all I wanted to do was go home. I was learning to endure boredom. That’s a skill. But it’s an expensive way to learn it.
What I think about university, after all these years, is this: it is one path, not the path. It is a very good path for certain people at certain moments. It is a waste of time and money for others, especially when it’s chosen out of habit or fear. The problem is that our whole school system is built around the assumption that university is the main route. Career guidance is often a single appointment in Year 11 where someone asks, “What are your predicted grades?” and then gives you a UCAS brochure. We don’t give teenagers enough honest information about alternatives. And we don’t give them enough experience of what work actually feels like before they make a choice that costs tens of thousands of pounds.
So here is what I’ve started telling parents who ask me, honestly, whether they should worry when their child says “I don’t think university is for me.”
First, don’t panic right away. That panic tells you more about your own history than about your child’s future. Let them talk for a full month before you argue. Ask questions about what they would instead, but don’t interrogate. Let them show you a job listing or a course. Treat it as serious.
Second, find a way for them to test it. Can they shadow someone in that field for a day? Can they do a two-week online course? Can they talk to a friend’s older brother who did an apprenticeship and now works in the field? Most teenagers are more influenced by a twenty-five-year-old they can vaguely relate to than by any number of parents telling them what to do.
Third, separate the social part from the educational part. Some kids choose university because they want to move out, make new friends, and become independent. That’s a legitimate desire, but it doesn’t require a degree in anthropology. Living in a shared flat with a job and a city full of people can give you that too. If your child is drawn to the experience rather than the subject, talk honestly about that difference. Help them see that staying at home for two years while doing an apprenticeship might feel less fun but might also feel more like building an actual life.
Fourth, take a long hard look at the money. The loan system in our country is complicated, and many parents still think university is the “safe” financial option because it always has been. It isn’t. If your child isn’t sure what to study, they may end up with a degree that doesn’t lead anywhere and a monthly repayment that follows them for decades. That isn’t a reason to forbid university. It’s a reason to make the choice deliberately, not by default.
In our family, the decision is still not made. My daughter has applied to two universities—one for computer science, one for a joint degree in design and technology—and she has also applied for a degree apprenticeship. She got an interview for the apprenticeship and a conditional offer from the computer science course. She sat down with her dad and me last Sunday and said, “I still don’t know which one I want.”
I wanted to say “Then maybe you’re not ready for either.” But I stopped myself. Being uncertain is not the same as being immature. She’s doing something many adults never do: she’s treating her future as a real decision rather than a script.
At school, they’re pushing her to firm a choice before the summer. She’s pushing back. She asked for an extension, which I didn’t even know was possible. She sent a polite email to her head of year saying she needed more time to compare the two options and had scheduled another visit to the apprenticeship employer. The head of year wrote back saying, “That’s exactly what we hope to see.” I read the email over her shoulder and felt a strange mix of pride and worry.
I still think university is a remarkable thing. It gave me friends I’ll know for life. It trained me to think clearly and write cleanly. It was, for me, the right mountain to climb. But my daughter is not me. She’s walking toward a different mountain, and I can’t tell yet if it’s smaller or bigger, only that it’s hers.
Last night I asked her what she thought now about university. She said, “I think it could be good for me. But I also think I’d be okay without it. I just need to know which version of good I want.” I nodded. I didn’t have a neat answer. I still don’t. But I’m learning that that might be the right place to stand—next to her, not in front of her, with no idea what comes next.
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