My Son Asked Me if University Was Worth It – Here’s What I Told Him
The question came from the passenger seat, not the back. My son, Leo, had just thrown his cross-country duffel into the trunk and dropped into the car with the kind of sigh that suggests practice went poorly. The windshield wipers were fighting a light drizzle, and he was staring at a smear of mud on the dashboard. “Do you ever regret going to university?” he asked, not looking at me.
I didn’t answer right away. I turned off the wipers because the rain was nearly done, and the sudden silence made the question feel bigger. Leo is sixteen. He’s in the middle of AP chemistry and a part-time job at a bike shop. He’s also the first person in our extended family who has any genuine chance of getting into a selective school. We’ve never pressured him, but I know the air around him has changed. Teachers smile differently at him. His grandmother asks about his GPA more than his guitar playing.
“I don’t regret it,” I said finally. “But I also didn’t love it in the way people expect.”
That opened a conversation I didn’t plan on having. And it made me realize how rarely we talk honestly about what university actually is, versus what we tell ourselves it will be.
I went to a large state school in the Midwest. My dorm room had a window that didn’t close properly, and my roommate and I communicated mostly through Post-it notes for the first month. I declared a major in history because I was good at writing essays, but I didn’t have any real interest in working in that field. I spent entire semesters taking classes that felt like checking boxes. There was one professor, a middle-aged woman who taught an intro to urban studies, who changed how I saw everything. She didn’t have a dramatic teaching style. She just asked questions that stayed with me. One day she mentioned that a city’s bus routes reveal more about its priorities than its statues. I haven’t forgotten that.
That, I think, is the real value of university. Not the degree, not the job placement rate, not the football games. It’s the accidental exposure to ideas you wouldn’t have found on your own. It’s the person in the next dorm room who grew up in a country you can barely point to on a map. It’s learning how to disagree with someone without turning it into a fight, because you have to sit next to them for fifteen more weeks.
But we don’t tell kids that. We tell them university is a path to a stable career, which is now often a lie. We tell them it’s the best four years of their life, which sets an impossible standard that can make real, ordinary experiences feel like failure. And we tell them that if they don’t go, they’ll be left behind, which ignores the dozens of other valid ways to build a life.
When Leo asked his question, I had to be honest with him—and with myself. I didn’t regret university because of the practical outcomes. My first job out of school had nothing to do with history. I worked in a call center for a year, then moved into sales, then management training. The degree got my résumé looked at. That was it. The actual content of my history degree was mostly irrelevant to my daily work for the next decade.
So why did I still feel it was worth something? Because university forced me to manage my own schedule, to cook for myself, to share space with strangers. It taught me how to write a coherent email (which is more than I can say for some directors I later worked with). It taught me how to evaluate sources, how to recognize when an argument was weak, how to sit with uncertainty. Those were not in the course catalog, but they were the real curriculum.
As we sat in the car, I told Leo that the biggest mistake he could make was to think of university as a reward for good grades, or as a step on a predetermined ladder. It’s not a reward. It’s a tool. And tools are only useful when you have a task in mind.
“What do you mean?” he asked. He was actually looking at me now, not just waiting for the light to change.
“If you go because you think you should, you’ll probably be miserable,” I said. “If you go because you’re curious about something—even if it’s not a ‘practical’ subject—you’ll have a much better time. But curiosity has to be developed. You can’t just switch it on in September.”
That’s the part I think parents get wrong. We worry so much about whether our kids will get in and how they’ll pay for it that we forget to ask them what they want to learn. Not what major to choose, but what questions keep them up at night. For Leo, it’s not chemistry. It’s the way his bike shop manager uses a spreadsheet to decide inventory, or why people in our town drive twenty minutes to a big-box store instead of shopping locally. He’s not going to find a major called “solving community problems with common sense.” But he could find a course in sociology, or economics, or urban planning that would give him new words for those observations.
I didn’t tell him he had to go to university. I told him he should consider a gap year if he wasn’t ready. I told him community college is a legitimate, less expensive way to take general requirements while figuring out adult life. I told him that some of my most successful colleagues in management had associate degrees in welding or completely unrelated certificates. Nobody talks about those paths because they don’t make for good bumper stickers, but they work.
What I didn’t tell him is that I still have nightmares about the final exam I never studied for in a statistics course I barely passed. That’s true, but it’s not the point.
We sat in the car for a few more minutes. A jogger passed by, and the rain started up again. Leo said he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go, but he felt like he had to decide soon because his counselor wanted to know which list he was building.
“Take the list less seriously,” I said. “Lists change. So do majors. So do people.”
He laughed a little. We drove home in silence after that, but it was a comfortable silence. He asked a question. I gave a messy, honest answer. That might be the most useful thing I’ve done as a parent this year.
Do I think university is worth it? I think it can be, for the right reasons and at the right time. But I also think we’ve built it into something it was never meant to be—a finish line rather than a starting point. The best thing we can do for kids isn’t to convince them they need four more years of school. It’s to help them understand what they’re looking for, whether that’s found in a lecture hall, a workshop, or a job at a bike shop.
Leo still doesn’t know what he wants to do. Neither did I at sixteen. The difference is, he knows he doesn’t have to have a perfect answer. That’s a start.
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