Can You Learn University-Level Content Without Going to University? A High School Teacher’s Perspective
Last month, I sat across from 18-year-old Javi and his mom Maria at my classroom desk after school, dry erase marker dust still coating the edge of my keyboard, a half-eaten peanut butter granola bar melting into a napkin from lunch. Maria leaned forward, her voice tight, and said exactly what every parent says when their kid tells them they don’t want to go to traditional college: “I just don’t understand how he can learn real university-level material sitting at our kitchen table. How does that even work?”
Javi was in my AP Computer Science class junior year. He finished the entire AP curriculum by mid-October, and spent the rest of the semester working through free MIT OpenCourseWare lectures during lunch, when the rest of the kids were playing pickup basketball or scrolling TikTok in the cafeteria. I’d check in on him once a week, and he’d walk me through the problem sets he was tackling, the same ones MIT undergrads do for their introductory algorithms class. By the end of junior year, he’d built a functional to-do app for local small businesses that 12 of them already use, and got a tentative offer for a part-time internship at a regional software company based on that work alone.
Maria had spent months worrying, because she’d worked 12-hour shifts as a nurse to put her older son through college a few years back, and the idea of skipping that whole step felt like throwing away a future. She didn’t just worry about job prospects—she worried Javi was missing out on the actual learning that college is supposed to give you.
Over the 9 years I’ve taught high school, I’ve gotten this question at least once a semester from parents and kids, so I’ve had a lot of time to watch what works and what doesn’t. The short answer is yes, it’s absolutely possible to learn university-level material without stepping foot on a college campus. Every top university in the US puts full lecture videos, problem sets, reading lists, and even past exams online for free. You can borrow most core university textbooks for free through your local public library’s digital lending program, or buy used copies for less than $20. There are active study groups on Reddit and Discord for almost every university-level subject, from macroeconomics to ancient history, where peers review each other’s work and answer questions when you get stuck. Last year, one of my former students self-studied the entire philosophy undergraduate curriculum from Oxford’s free course materials, and now writes essays for a small philosophy journal that pays him for his work.
But it’s not for everyone, and it takes intentional planning, not just skipping college and hoping for the best. That’s the part most think pieces about this topic leave out. The first thing I tell any kid considering this is to test it for six months while you’re still in high school. That’s low risk, you don’t have to give anything up to try. Javi spent the first semester of senior year doing 5 hours a week of structured university-level work, sticking to a fixed schedule, before he made the final call not to enroll. Half the kids who test it drop the idea after that, because they realize they’d rather have someone else set their schedule and deadlines than do it themselves. That’s fine—there’s no shame in that, traditional college works great for those kids.
Second, you have to build in feedback and accountability intentionally, because that’s the biggest thing you get from university that you don’t get just from reading lectures. Javi set up a biweekly 30-minute check-in with a retired software engineer who lives in our town, who mentors kids through a local STEM nonprofit. Every other week, he walks his mentor through what he’s been working on, and the mentor asks him tough questions, points out gaps in his code, and makes him explain his reasoning. If he misses a week of work, his mentor calls him out on it. That’s way more consistent than trying to hold yourself accountable alone, and it doesn’t cost anything—most towns have retired professionals who are happy to volunteer an hour a week to work with a motivated kid.
Third, if you’re doing this to build a career, you have to build work experience alongside the learning, because that’s what replaces the degree on your resume for most fields. Javi did three small pro bono projects for local businesses in his senior year—building a website for the local animal shelter, updating the inventory system for a neighborhood grocery store—and those projects are more impressive to most employers than a college transcript right now.
Halfway through our meeting, a freshman stuck his head in the door asking for a late hall pass, and I scribbled one out before turning back to Javi and Maria. I pulled Javi’s GitHub up on the classroom projector, and showed Maria the compiler he’d built for his OpenCourseWare final project, and the open source tool he contributed to that’s used by more than 2,000 developers around the world. She sat quiet for a minute, then nodded.
Last week, I ran into Javi at the downtown coffee shop. He was sitting at a corner table, a notebook full of algorithm notes spread out in front of him, taking a break from his internship to work through a problem set. He told me it’s harder than he expected—some weeks he has to force himself to sit down and work when all his friends are out at college football games, and some topics don’t make sense even after watching three different lectures. But he also said he’s not wasting time taking gen ed classes he doesn’t care about just to get a degree, and he’s learning more every month than he did in a full year of any high school class he ever took. I don’t know if he’ll decide to get a formal degree in five years when he wants to apply for a senior role, or if this path will work out long term. Right now, though, it’s working. The idea that you can only get a university-level education at a university isn’t true anymore—not for every kid, anyway. It’s not the right choice for everyone, but it’s a real choice, if you go into it prepared.
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