Most parents I know have a version of the same story: the moment their kid comes home from college and suddenly realizes the house rules no longer apply. For my husband and me, it happened during the winter break of our daughter’s sophomore year. She walked in with a duffel bag full of laundry and a new vocabulary that included words like “authentic self” and “optional engagement.” She also had a schedule that involved sleeping until noon and making ramen at 11 p.m. while watching lectures at 1.5x speed.
Watching her navigate that semester made me think a lot about what we’re actually asking universities to do, and where teachers fit into a world where a kid can access a full course syllabus for free on her phone.
I used to work as a high school English teacher, so I have a soft spot for the traditional structure of education. I like the rhythm of a semester, the physical act of raising a hand, and the smell of old books in a library. When my daughter started college, I worried she wouldn’t find those things. She’s a practical kid, more likely to ask “how does this help me get a job?” than to sit in awe of a sonnet. I expected her to be cynical about the whole experience.
The first sign that something had shifted was during a phone call in October. She was frustrated, but not about a difficult professor or a confusing textbook. She was annoyed by a group project. “We have to make a five-minute video explaining our research,” she said, sighing. “But one of the guys in my group just wants to write a paper. He keeps saying the video is ‘redundant.'”
That conversation stuck with me. It wasn’t about the content of the research. It was about the skills—the collaboration, the video editing, the compromise. She was learning how to function in a world that values presentation as much as knowledge. The university was no longer just a place to accumulate facts; it was a testing ground for her ability to perform under new kinds of pressure.
Teachers today are in a strange spot. The university is still the institution that grants the credential—the degree that gets you past the first round of HR filters. But most professors are caught between wanting to teach critical thinking and being asked to prepare students for a workforce that changes faster than the curriculum can be updated. A professor lecturing on Romantic poetry might feel a bit like a blacksmith giving a live demonstration at a tech convention. The craft is still real, but the audience is wondering if they should be using an app for that.
The bigger issue, I think, is the blurred lines between a paid service and a communal space. When my daughter pays her tuition, she is a customer. She buys a seat in a lecture hall. But learning doesn’t work like a transaction. You can’t just purchase the ability to analyze a text or solve a complicated equation. That requires cognitive work, and cognitive work is messy. It requires making mistakes, sitting in discomfort, and sometimes failing a midterm.
I asked a friend of mine who teaches sociology at a state school how she deals with this. She told me about a student who came to office hours, not to ask about the reading, but to ask what they needed to do to get a “B” in the class. They weren’t interested in the material; they were only interested in the metric. My friend said she felt like a vending machine. You put in the effort, you press the button, and the grade comes out. The student wasn’t being rude; they were just being efficient with their time and money.
That’s where the honest conversation about the role of teachers has to happen. We can’t pretend the transactional pressure doesn’t exist. But we can also see the moments when it breaks down. My daughter’s favorite class this semester wasn’t a high-tech simulation or a famous professor’s TED-talk-style lecture. It was a small discussion seminar taught by a graduate student who was clearly still figuring things out. The grad student spent the first ten minutes of class checking their notes and fumbling with the projector. But once the discussion started, something clicked. The grad student asked a question and then just… listened. They didn’t have a pre-packaged answer. They sat with the silence, which is something a lot of teachers are afraid to do.
My daughter took a “gap year” before college, mostly because she wanted to save money. She worked in a coffee shop. In that year, she learned more about scheduling conflicts and conflict resolution than I ever did in a lecture hall. She learned how to handle a customer who yelled at her about the price of a latte. She learned how to ask a coworker for help without feeling like she was failing. When she finally got to college, she told me that the classroom felt like a “break” from the real world.
And maybe that’s the problem. Or maybe that’s the point now. Universities are becoming places where you go to step back, to practice thinking before you have to act. The teacher’s role isn’t just to deliver information anymore. It’s to create the conditions for that pause. It’s to say, “Here is a problem. It is complex. Let’s sit with it for an hour and see what happens when we try to talk it through.”
The practical takeaway for me, as a parent, is to watch how my daughter responds to the friction. Is she annoyed by the group project, or does she figure out how to work with the guy who wants to write the paper? Is she scared of the professor who grades harshly, or does she see their feedback as a way to get tougher? Those reactions matter more than the actual letter grade.
Last night, she showed me a draft of an essay she was writing for that sociology class. It was about the gig economy, which felt a bit like a movie plot to me. But she was engaged. She was connecting the dots between her summer job and academic theory. She was starting to see the university not just as a place to get a piece of paper, but as a place that gives you the language to describe the life you’ve already lived.
I’m still not sure what that means for the future of higher education. Maybe the lecture will disappear entirely, replaced by online modules and AI tutors. Maybe the professor will become more of a coach than a sage. But I suspect the core need will remain. We still need people in the room who are willing to ask hard questions and wait for the answer. We still need places that value thinking before doing, even if the thinking looks a little ragged and unsure. The role of the teacher is to hold the door open, and the role of the university is to make sure the door is worth walking through. For now, that seems to be working—mostly.
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