Is University Still Worth It? How to Help Your Teen Think It Through
On a Tuesday evening in February, my sixteen-year-old son, Oscar, was sprawled across the kitchen table, one headphone out, laptop open to a UCAS course search he hadn’t asked to see. The kettle had just boiled, and I was making tea before realising he’d stopped doing his maths homework. “Can I ask you something?” he said, not looking up. “What do you actually think about university?”
It’s a question I’ve heard from friends, from parents at school pickup, and from my own tired brain on bad days. But hearing it from my own child, in our kitchen, felt different. I didn’t want to give him the standard answer: that university is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, that a degree opens doors, that he should work hard and decide later. He wasn’t asking about higher education in general. He was asking whether the path everyone expected of him was one he had to walk.
I didn’t say any of that straight away. I sat down opposite him and asked what brought it on. He shrugged and said that in form time, his maths teacher had told him “when you get to university, you’ll need to manage your time better.” Not “if.” When. Then a friend had sent a photo of herself in front of a cathedral-style campus, captioned “my home for three years.” Everyone his age seemed to be sorting themselves into two boxes: those going to uni and those being left behind.
That word “left behind” stayed with me. We talked about the feeling that university is a train everyone boards at eighteen, and if you don’t get on, you’ll be stuck on the platform forever. I told him I’d felt exactly the same. I went to university because I didn’t know what else to do. I chose English literature because I liked reading, then spent three years discovering I didn’t like writing essays about books under pressure. I graduated, worked in retail, then did a journalism diploma and ended up in a career I love. The degree didn’t hurt. But it didn’t open up my life the way the sixth-form speeches promised it would.
Oscar is quieter than I was. He doesn’t care about campus life or Freshers’ Week. He’s been designing logos and posters for local bands since he was fourteen, and he’s already had paid work from a small record label. His art teacher calls him “the most self-directed student she’s seen in years.” But he’s also good at maths and sciences, and people assume that means he should be a doctor, an engineer, or at least someone with a “proper” degree. He asked me if I’d be disappointed if he didn’t go.
It would have been easy to say no, of course not, I just want you to be happy. But that’s not really practical, is it? He wanted to know what to do next. So we talked about the actual mechanics of deciding, rather than the grand question of whether university is worth it.
The first thing I said was this: don’t decide yet. The UCAS deadline had already passed for that year, and he was only in year 12 anyway. There was no reason to close any doors at sixteen. Parents and teachers often ask teenagers to make huge decisions before they’ve had any real experience of adult life. The “what do you want to do?” conversation usually happens in a classroom at 9am, surrounded by sticky notes and exam timetables. So instead of asking what he wanted to do, I asked him to describe a normal working day at age twenty-five. What time would he get up? Would he be at a desk? Would he be on his feet? Would he be working alone on a laptop, or in a room with other people? He couldn’t answer, and that was fine. But it gave us a starting point that wasn’t about status or grades.
Then I told him to think about the financial realities of university, but not in a scary, “you’ll be in debt forever” way. We looked up how student loans actually work: you only start repaying if your income is above a certain threshold, and the repayment is a small percentage taken out like tax. A degree is expensive, but it’s not a loan with a shark attached to it. What’s often more useful to compare is the opportunity cost. What would he be giving up? And what could he do with those three years instead?
For him, the alternative was obvious: work for a design studio, take on freelance clients, build a portfolio, or try a degree apprenticeship in digital design. We looked at two or three actual apprenticeships and found that some pay a real wage and include day release at university. That surprised us both. We also looked at university courses with a placement year, and ones that allow you to live at home and commute. The point wasn’t to make a chart of pros and cons. It was to show him that university is not a single thing. It’s thousands of different experiences, some great, some terrible, many just okay.
I also told him something I wish someone had told me: you can go to university at any age. My neighbour started nursing at thirty-seven. A friend did a part-time degree while raising twins through the Open University. My cousin dropped out, worked abroad, and went back at twenty-four to study food science. No one at his graduation asked why he was older. The idea that there’s a right time or a last-chance moment is mostly fear, not fact. If Oscar decides to go in two years, or five, or ten, the doors will still be there. They may even be easier to open, because he’ll know what he wants from them.
We talked about what he should actually do in the meantime, and here’s where I’ll be honest: I don’t have a perfect plan. I’m still learning how to parent a teenager who is smarter than I was at his age and far less inclined to accept comfortable myths. What I’ve found works is slowing down the decision, making it concrete, and removing the pressure to choose a life at sixteen. When Oscar asked again, “What do you think about university?” I said, “I think it’s a tool, not a test. It’s good for some things, bad for others, and completely irrelevant to certain jobs. You don’t need to prove yourself to me by going. You just need enough time to figure out what you actually want to learn.”
He nodded, closed the laptop, and said he’d think about it. Then he asked if we had any biscuits. I don’t think we solved anything that evening. But the question is now sitting on the table between us, not hanging over his head. He knows I don’t need him to go or stay. What I need is for him to make a decision based on his own life, not on the momentum of everyone around him. That might not be the most inspiring thing to say, but it’s the most honest one I’ve got.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is University Still Worth It