Can You Learn University-Level Material Without Attending University? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last Tuesday, I was stacking ungraded 10th grade persuasive essays on my desk after parent-teacher conferences, the school coffee pot already drained and the hallway smelling like lemon floor wax and leftover pepperoni pizza from student council, when Mia knocked softly on my door. She’s the mom of Javi, who graduated from my class last year, and she’d stayed behind to talk, her shoulders hunched like she was carrying something heavy.
She sat down in the scuffed plastic student chair by my desk and pulled out her phone, showing me a screenshot of Javi’s open laptop: a syllabus for an upper-level thermodynamics course. “He’s working full-time at the hardware store downtown,” she said. “Says he’s learning engineering on his own, that he doesn’t need to go to university to get the same education. But that can’t be real, right? I don’t want him to waste his early 20s chasing something that doesn’t count.”
I thought immediately of Lila, one of my students who graduated in 2020. Her mom was a pediatric nurse who’d racked up thousands in cancer bills that year, and there was no money for tuition, even at our local community college. Lila took a job as a front desk admin at the same clinic her mom worked at, and six months in she told me she wanted to study molecular biology—she wanted to work in genetic counseling, same as the researchers who’d helped her mom’s care team. I thought she’d lose steam after a month, but she had a clear plan.
She pulled the full four-year course sequence from the University of Washington’s bio program, all posted publicly on their website for anyone to access. She used free textbooks from OpenStax, watched free recorded lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare, and joined a Discord study group for 30 other self-studying bio students around the world. When she hit a concept she couldn’t work through, she’d post a question in the group, or email the prof who’d posted the lecture online—half the time, he wrote back within a few days. After two years, she put together a personal website with her independent research project, an analysis of BRCA variant prevalence in our local patient population that she did with help from one of the clinic’s doctors. A small local research lab hired her as a part-time research assistant, no degree required, because she could prove she already knew the work. Now she’s taking two classes a semester at our local state college, working her way toward an accredited degree, and she’s already three years ahead of most traditional undergrads in experience.
I told Mia that the big mistake most people make with this question is mixing up two very separate things: a university degree, which is a formal credential most employers and licensed professions require, and university-level learning, which is just mastering the same advanced material that traditional university students study. The actual content you learn in a 4-year degree program isn’t a secret that’s locked behind university walls anymore. It’s all available for almost no cost, if you know where to look.
That doesn’t mean it’s the same experience, or that it’s easy. I’ve seen enough self-learners burn out to know what the common pitfalls are, and there are small, concrete things parents can do to help if their kid wants to try this path. The first is to start with structure, not random YouTube videos. Most accredited public universities post their full 4-year course sequences online for free—help your kid map it out semester by semester, so they don’t skip the foundational classes (like calculus, for engineering) and jump straight to the exciting advanced material they saw online. The second is to lock in a fixed study time. A lot of self-learners rely on “free time” after work, and it never materializes. Just 1.5 to 2 hours a day, same time every day, is enough to work through a full university-level course in a semester. The third is to find at least one person who can answer questions and review work every few weeks. That doesn’t have to be a full-time professor—it can be a retired engineer in your town, a local community college instructor who doesn’t mind an occasional email, or a more experienced self-learner in an online group. Most people are happy to help for free, if you’re polite and specific with your questions.
The last thing I told Mia is to separate the learning conversation from the credential conversation early. If Javi wants to get a professional engineering license one day, he will eventually need an accredited degree. But learning the material first doesn’t waste time—it helps him confirm he actually likes engineering before he spends tens of thousands on tuition, and it will make any future classes he takes far easier. If he ends up working in a niche field like industrial design that cares more about your portfolio than your degree, he might never need that degree at all.
After we talked for 45 minutes, Mia said she’d go home and actually look at the bulletin board in Javi’s room that he’d covered in his study plan—she’d assumed it was just random notes and doodles. A week later, Javi stopped by the school to replace a broken fan in our drama room projector, a little side job he does for extra cash. He said his mom had already agreed to cover the $12 monthly fee for an online proctoring service that lets him take official end-of-course exams for the open courses he’s taking, so he can check how much he’s actually learning.
He’s still working 40 hours a week at the hardware store, still doesn’t have a university degree, and he might decide to apply to a part-time program in two years once he’s saved enough tuition, or he might find an entry-level design job that will hire him based on his portfolio of projects. No one knows how it’s going to turn out yet. But the idea that he can’t learn university-level engineering without sitting in a university lecture hall? That’s not true anymore. It’s not the easy path, it’s not the path most people take, but it’s absolutely possible.
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