Is Education Still the Key to a Better Future? How Parents and Teachers Can Talk Honestly With Teens
The pepperoni on Javi’s half-eaten frozen pizza had gone congealed when he pushed his laptop away last Tuesday, his Common App essay half-written about how his AP Bio teacher inspired him to study environmental science. “What’s the point, anyway?” he said, not looking at me, thumb scrolling a TikTok where a 2021 state college grad was talking about driving Uber 45 hours a week to cover $32,000 in student loans. “You and Dad and every teacher since third grade have said school gets you a better life. But half the people I see online did everything right and they’re still broke. Why should I sink all that time and money into something that doesn’t pay off?”
I almost said the line I’d been taught to repeat, the one every adult falls back on: Education opens doors. It’s not just about jobs. You’ll never regret having that degree. It came out before I thought, and Javi just rolled his eyes and went back to his phone. That line worked when I was 17, in 1998. Back then, in-state tuition at our local university was $2,800 a year. I waited tables three nights a week all summer and covered half my bill, and graduated with $4,000 in total loans that I paid off in three years with an entry-level office job that came with full health insurance. The deal felt straightforward then: put in the work, follow the path, and you’d almost certainly be more financially stable than your parents.
A week later, at parent-teacher conferences, I brought the exchange up with Rita Henderson, his AP Gov teacher, who’s been at the school 22 years. She nodded before I finished talking, and pulled a stack of exit tickets from her desk drawer, half scrawled with the same question. It’s not just the kids who struggle in school asking, she said. Last semester, her student body president, a girl with a 4.2 GPA and a full-ride offer to the state honors college, turned it down to take a union electrical apprenticeship. Her older brother got a mechanical engineering degree in 2020, and he still works at a hardware store because every entry-level engineering role wanted two years of experience he couldn’t get without taking an unpaid internship he couldn’t afford. “I stopped leading with ‘education is the key to success’ three years ago,” Rita told me, while the next parent waited by the door. “The kids know that line doesn’t match what they see. If I start there, they check out before I say another word.”
The mistake most of us make, I think, is treating that old line as a universal guarantee, when it was always a description of a specific economy, one that doesn’t exist anymore. Housing costs in our area have tripled since I bought our house in 2004. Entry-level wages for college grads have barely budged, adjusted for inflation, in 20 years. More than half of recent grads leave school with debt, and a third of those work jobs that don’t require a degree at all. Teens aren’t being lazy or unmotivated when they ask if it’s worth it. They’re just paying better attention than we are sometimes.
That night, I didn’t bring college up again until after Javi finished his physics homework and came out for a glass of iced tea. Instead of repeating the old script, I pulled out the chair next to him and said, “Show me those videos you were watching the other night. The ones about grads and loans. I want to see what you’re seeing.” He looked surprised, but he pulled them up: 10 or 12 clips, not just rants, but an elementary ed teacher working a second weekend job to cover rent, a computer science grad laid off six months into his first role, a former nursing student who dropped out because she couldn’t cover program fees and got a nursing assistant certificate that paid her more in her first year. I didn’t argue with any of them. I told him about my coworker Lila, whose son got a marketing degree in 2019 and still picks up barista shifts to cover his loan payments, because every entry role wanted 1-2 years of experience. By the end of the night, he was the one bringing up parts of the environmental science path he still liked, not just the downsides.
The next Saturday, after we picked up everything bagels with scallion cream cheese from the shop down the street, we pulled up a blank Google Sheet on the kitchen counter—no fancy college planning tools, no glossy guidance counselor handouts. We listed the three paths he’d actually found himself curious about over the past year: a four-year environmental science degree at the state school, a two-year renewable energy technician certificate at the community college 20 minutes from our house, and the union solar installation apprenticeship his best friend’s older brother started the year before. We looked up actual numbers, not marketing copy on school websites: entry-level pay for roles posted in our area in the last 30 days, average total debt for people who finish each program, how long training takes, whether roles come with health insurance and paid time off.
What we found wasn’t a clear winner, which felt more honest than any college brochure. The apprenticeship pays $19 an hour day one, no tuition costs, and guaranteed raises every six months as you log training hours, but work slows for six weeks every winter if new construction permits lag. The community college certificate costs $3,400 total, he can live at home and work part time while he completes it, and 80% of last year’s grads got job offers for solar site assessment before they graduated, starting at $24 an hour. The four-year degree opens up roles in state environmental policy and large-scale conservation project management that pay $15,000 more a year on average long term, but even with the merit aid he qualifies for, he’d leave with around $21,000 in debt, and most entry roles want three to six months of internship experience, most of which are unpaid. He also found out most local solar companies cover 100% of tuition for employees who want to go back to school for a four-year degree later. That detail never came up in any of his college info nights, because the default high school script still pushes four-year college right after graduation as the only real “success” path.
Rita told me she works this same kind of concrete mapping into her senior gov class now, a 20-minute activity the first week of school that requires no fancy curriculum. She asks kids to write down five specific, small things they want for their adult life, not “be successful”: a dog, a reliable car, three weeks off a year to hike, enough money to help their parents with bills, health insurance that covers their meds. Then she has them look up two different training or education paths that could get them those things, and write down actual costs and pay, not what they’ve heard from adults. Half the kids end up adding paths they never considered, she said, from cosmetology apprenticeships to military training to part-time community college while working. “Education is still useful,” she said. “But it’s not one single thing. It’s not a four-year degree or nothing. You can take it in chunks, when you need it, for what you want to do.”
I know this kind of low-stakes exploration is easier for us than it is for a lot of families. Javi can live at home rent free while he tests out paths, we have steady internet and the time to sit and look up numbers together, and he doesn’t have to send money home to cover family bills. A lot of teens don’t have that buffer, and that’s a big part of why the old promise feels so hollow for so many. The problem was never education itself. It’s that the bargain attached to it changed, and adults kept repeating the same line like nothing shifted.
Javi’s still finishing his Common App essay, and he still plans to apply to the state environmental science program, just in case. But he also signed up for the community college’s Tuesday night intro to renewable energy class next semester, and he’s going to shadow his friend’s brother on a solar install for a day over spring break. He hasn’t picked a path yet, and that’s fine.
I still catch myself falling back on the old line sometimes, when he’s procrastinating on a homework assignment and I lean against his doorframe and say “C’mon, this matters for your future.” But now I don’t say it like it’s a guarantee. Education can teach you to write clearly, understand how the world works, meet people who care about the same things you do, and check the boxes for jobs that require specific training. It doesn’t work like a vending machine anymore: put in four years and tuition money, get a stable, comfortable life out the other end. That part of the promise isn’t holding up, and pretending it does just makes teens trust us less when we talk about what actually does matter.
Last week he came home from school and said his AP Bio teacher brought in a guest speaker, a woman who started as a solar installation tech right out of high school, took classes part time for six years, and now runs the city’s residential solar incentive program. He said it was the first time the path didn’t sound like something adults made up to get him to do his homework. We still don’t know what he’ll do next year, or 10 years from now. But at least we’re not relying on an old key to open a door that doesn’t look the same anymore. We’re looking at the doors first, together.
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