My degree is in English literature, and it took me about twelve years to admit what that actually meant.
The moment that forced the issue was ordinary enough. My daughter, then nine, was doing homework at the kitchen table—a worksheet about the water cycle. She asked me to check her answers, and I did, and then she looked up and said, “What did you learn in college?”
I gave her some version of what I usually said. That I read a lot of books. That I wrote a lot of essays. She nodded and went back to her worksheet. But the question sat with me for the rest of the evening. What did I learn in college? And more importantly, did any of it shape me?
The honest answer is complicated. I have a degree that says I studied literature. I have a job that has nothing to do with literature. And yet, when I think about the person I became in those four years, the degree itself feels almost incidental. What shaped me was everything around it.
I remember sitting in a seminar on Victorian novels in my second year, completely lost. The professor was talking about narrative distance, and I had no idea what that meant. I nodded along, took notes, pretended I understood. Then I went back to my dorm room and read the same chapter of Middlemarch three times, trying to figure out what I was missing. That wasn’t the degree shaping me. That was just me, alone, frustrated, learning how to sit with confusion.
That is a skill. It’s not listed on any transcript, but it’s real.
The practical things I learned in college were mostly useless in the way you’d expect. I can write a very good close reading of a poem. I cannot do long division without a calculator. But the uncomfortable skills—the ones nobody lists in the course catalogue—those are the ones that stuck. I learned how to read a long text I didn’t care about and find something in it worth saying. I learned how to argue a point I wasn’t sure I believed. I learned how to sit in a fluorescent-lit room at 2 a.m. with a deadline looming and produce something that was, if not good, at least complete.
None of that happened because of the degree. It happened because I was young and had time and was forced to show up to things.
Here is what I have to remind myself when I think about my daughter’s future education: the degree is a container, not the contents. What matters is what actually happened while she’s in it. And that’s almost impossible to predict from the outside.
I’ve watched my friends’ children go through university in all kinds of ways. One girl studied biochemistry and now works in a lab, which sounds like a neat story. But when her mother talks about it, the real story is about how she failed organic chemistry in her first year and had to retake it, and how that failure taught her how to ask for help. Another boy studied business and now runs a small bakery, which his degree did not prepare him for at all. But the discipline of sitting through finance classes he hated gave him the tolerance for the parts of running a business that are boring and hard.
That’s what I mean. The specific subject matters less than the experience of being asked to do things you don’t necessarily want to do, in a structured environment, with people your own age, and figure out how to get through it.
I don’t say this to dismiss the value of what’s learned. I use the stuff I learned in my degree more than I admit. When I read a contract, I notice how the language is designed to obscure meaning. When I listen to a politician, I hear the rhetorical tricks. When my daughter tells me a story about her day, I notice what she’s leaving out. That’s what four years of studying literature did. It gave me a permanent awareness that language is never neutral.
But here’s the thing I wish someone had told me when I was picking a university: nobody knows what they’re doing. We treat choosing a degree like it’s a prediction of a life, when really it’s just a guess about what you might want to spend three or four years thinking about. The people who treat it like a destiny are the ones who end up most confused, because life doesn’t read your transcripts.
So when I think about my daughter, and when I talk to other parents who are anxious about university choices, I try to normalize a different question. Not “What will you get from this degree?” but “What kind of experience do you want to have?” The answer is rarely about the subject itself.
At the kitchen table that night, I didn’t say any of this to my nine-year-old. I just told her that I learned how to think carefully about things, and she said “Oh,” and asked if she could have a snack. It was a silly question—why ask about college when there are goldfish crackers to consider?
But later, I kept circling back to it. Did my degree shape me? Yes. But not the way I expected, and not in the way that the brochures suggest. It shaped me because it gave me four years of problems that were hard enough to be worth solving but safe enough that failing wasn’t fatal. It shaped me because it put me in rooms with people who disagreed with me and expected me to respond with something better than anger. It shaped me because it taught me that the thing I was afraid of—being publicly wrong, being judged, being average—was survivable.
I don’t know if my daughter will go to university. She’s ten now, and she changes her mind about the future about twice a week. Sometimes she wants to be a veterinarian. Sometimes she wants to be a “horse girl who lives in a cabin.” Both are plausible.
What I hope for her is not that she gets a degree. I hope she gets the space to try things that are a little too hard for her, and fail at some of them, and discover that failure is not a verdict. I hope she has a teacher who pushes her, and a friend who challenges her, and a subject that genuinely confuses her. If those things happen, the degree will take care of itself.
And if they don’t, the degree won’t matter much either way. That’s the part nobody tells you about education. It only works if you’re actually paying attention while it’s happening. The certificate is just a receipt.
I still have my degree on the wall of my office. It’s in a frame I’ve been meaning to replace for years. My daughter pointed at it once and asked if it was a diploma. I said yes. She asked if it was hard work. I said the work itself wasn’t that hard—it was the fifteen years since that were hard. She looked at me like I was being dramatic, which I probably was.
The truth is, I don’t know if it was worth it. That’s the honest answer. It gave me a lot, and it cost a lot, and the two things are hard to untangle. But I know that when I look at the person I am now—the parent, the reader, the person who notices what’s not being said—I can trace parts of her back to those seminar rooms and late nights. Not the degree. The experience.
And that’s what I try to tell other parents when they ask me about education, whether it’s university or primary school or anything in between. Don’t fixate on the paper. Fixate on the days. On the moments when your child is confused, or frustrated, or disappointed—because those are where the shaping actually happens.
The degree is just what’s left over after all that. A receipt for the real transaction.
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