Is University Worth It? A Parent’s Honest Take on Higher Education
The question came at the dinner table, somewhere between the roast chicken and the salad. My niece, Jamie, was seventeen and doing that thing where she pushed her peas around the plate like they contained the secrets of the universe. My younger brother—who dropped out of community college in 2004 and now runs a decent landscaping business—looked at her and said, “Why spend sixty thousand dollars on a piece of paper when I’m making more than you’ll make for the first five years after you graduate?”
Jamie went quiet. My mother started doing dishes loudly. My brother-in-law, who teaches high school math, said, “Not everyone cuts lawns for a living.”
I sat there chewing. The question wasn’t really for Jamie. It was for me. I was the one with the English degree, the one who spent three years a decade ago working a dead-end office job before landing in something that vaguely related to my major. I’d spent my twenties asking the same question. I still didn’t have an answer that fit neatly onto a bumper sticker.
So I said, “I got a lot out of university. But I’m not entirely sure I’d tell her it’s the only way to get it.”
That started the conversation.
My daughter is fourteen. She’s the one doing algebra at the kitchen counter at nine at night, head propped on her hand, asking “but why do I need this?” It’s a tired question, and I usually parrot back something about critical thinking or persistence. But lately I’ve caught myself saying “because you’ll need it for university,” and then stopping. Because will she? I didn’t really use half the math I was taught. I didn’t use my degree structure at all.
What did university give me, actually?
Time, mostly. Three years of not ruffling my feathers into a career too early. I learned how to read thick books I didn’t want to read. I learned how to write a paper the night before a deadline and, occasionally, how to write a good one. I made friends I still trust. I didn’t learn how to respond to a passive-aggressive email. Nobody taught me how to leave a job you hate without burning bridges. No professor explained to me how compounding interest works—I learned that by helping my mother do her taxes at the dining table when I was twenty-two.
That’s the thing I’ve come to believe about university after all these years: it’s not one experience. It’s a bundle. For some people, that bundle includes a life-changing mentor and a close group of peers and a degree that becomes a scary credential. For others, it’s four years of debt and an expensive piece of paper that sits in a drawer.
My husband is an engineer. His degree matters in a very specific, technical way. You cannot take a crash course in structural integrity and call it a career. My cousin is a plumber. He did an apprenticeship, bought a van, and by the time he was thirty he was doing better than both of us. My best friend from high school went to a coding bootcamp at twenty-nine, now works fully remote, and took her kids to Spain twice last year. Her sister, who has a master’s in art history, works at a museum gift shop.
So the real question—the one Jamie was actually asking with all that pea-pushing—is not “should I go to university?” It’s “what is university for, anymore?”
I don’t have a clean answer. But I’ve figured out what I think.
I think university is good at some things and terrible at others. It’s good at giving you a safe, concentrated space to fail. For the first time in your life, you write a paper that falls apart, and the only consequence is a grade and a conversation with your professor about how to do it better. That matters. It’s a rehearsal space for the large, clumsy mistakes of adulthood. But it’s a very expensive rehearsal.
It’s also a sorting mechanism. In many jobs, the degree is not about the knowledge. It’s about proving you can tolerate four years of deadlines and group projects and someone else’s arbitrary rules. That’s actually worth something to an employer. But it’s worth a certain amount, and it is not worth the same amount for every person. It isn’t wrong to say “that’s not worth $50,000 to me, I’ll go a different way.”
Here’s what I’ve started telling the kids in our house, and what I wish someone had told me:
Try the thing before you invest four years in it. Not a lecture course—an actual encounter. Shadow your cousin for a day. Volunteer at a clinic. Take apart a laptop. Build a website for your uncle’s bakery. You need to know what working in a field feels like on a Tuesday afternoon, not just what it looks like from a career fair.
If you do go, be honest about the finances. I’m not saying “only go if you can pay outright.” I’m saying look at the first job salary in that field, not the Sixth-year salary, and divide it into the loan repayment. That’s not cynical. That’s arithmetic. I know people who took $80,000 in loans for a degree that got them a $32,000 salary. I know people who went to community college for two years and transferred, and they’re fine.
Take a gap year. Not a gap year spent on the couch playing games—a gap year where you work at a warehouse for nine months and feel what that’s like, and then decide. If the choice is still yes, you’ll be more certain. If the choice is no, you’ve saved yourself a lot of money.
The other thing I’ve learned, watching my brother: there is a strange dignity in knowing exactly what you want to do and not apologizing for it. He never read Plato. He never felt the need to explain the deeper meaning of “The Great Gatsby.” He also never felt small when he fixed a water heater in front of a homeowner who couldn’t do it. That’s a kind of education too.
My mother called a few days after that dinner, worried about Jamie. “She’s a bright girl,” she said. “She should go to university.”
I didn’t push back. I don’t know what Jamie should do. I know that when my daughter asks me about university, I’m not going to give her a speech. I’m going to hand her a spread of options and make some tea. And I’m going to ask her what problem she thinks is interesting to solve, not what job she wants to have. Then we’ll do the math together. And it’s possible the answer will be some middle thing I can’t predict.
That’s okay. The more I think about it, the less I’m convinced the question is “should you go to university” and the more it’s “what are you going to do to keep learning for the next ten years.” The name and the price tag on that—whatever it ends up being—are still up for debate. I’m glad I have a few more years to figure it out before it’s her turn.
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