The Dishwasher Question
My 15-year-old was unloading the dishwasher in a way I can only describe as “performed reluctance,” moving each plate like it had personally offended him. I was wiping down the counters, and out of nowhere he said, “What do you think about university?”
It was such a normal, boring moment for such a loaded question. I stopped wiping.
“Meaning, what do I think about it in general, or about you going?”
He shrugged. “Like, whether it’s worth it. Everyone always says you have to go, but I don’t know.”
The dishwasher door was still open, and I remember getting a blast of damp, warm air mixed with the smell of whatever we’d had for dinner three days earlier. I didn’t have a good answer. I told him I’d need to think about it, which is what parents say when they don’t want to admit that they, too, have been wondering about this for years.
We’ve all absorbed the script. You finish high school, you go to university, you get a degree, you get a job. Even parents like me, who found university genuinely life-changing, are starting to understand that the script isn’t hitting the way it used to. The sticker price of a four-year degree from our local university has nearly tripled since I graduated. Student loans follow people around for decades. I have friends with master’s degrees working jobs that don’t require a high school diploma.
But I still catch myself. When he said “everyone always says,” I wanted to correct him, to tell him that university is more than job training. It’s where you meet people who change your view of the world. It’s where you get to study something just because you find it fascinating. I’m not sure he was in the mood for a thunderous defense of the liberal arts, so I kept it in.
Here’s what I did instead, a little reluctantly, because it’s easier to give children answers than to ask them questions.
Over the next few weeks, we kept bringing it up in small pockets of time. Car rides were the best, because he didn’t have to make eye contact. I asked him what he pictured when he imagined university. He described walking across a crowded quad between old buildings, living in a dorm, joining a club for video games. It sounded fine, but it also sounded like he’d described it from a movie he’d seen. I asked him what he actually wanted to study, if money weren’t a concern. He drew a blank. He’s a smart, quiet kid who does well in math and history but cares deeply about nothing in particular yet. That’s developmentally normal, but it doesn’t help when the whole, singular path in front of you is “go to university.”
I started asking around. I mentioned this to my neighbor, who works as a plumbing contractor. The demand for apprentices is so high that he’s turning people away. He told me that a first-year apprentice earns about the same as a graduate teacher, but the apprentice has no debt and will be earning full wages by the time the teacher is still in their first year of work. I didn’t tell the neighbor his story sounded like propaganda for the trades, because it wasn’t—he still sends his own kid to a college at night for business classes. But it made me realize something.
The point isn’t that kids should either go to university or learn a trade. The point is that none of these paths work as a single, irreversible decision made at 17.
I started talking with my son less like a parent and more like a guide, but without the corporate terms. We wrote down the actual cost of a year at one university versus starting at the community college downtown, whose credits transfer fully. When he realized the community college route costs maybe fifteen percent of the total, something changed in his face. Not excitement, but a small release of pressure.
That’s when I realized he wasn’t asking me what I thought about university at all. He was asking me whether it was okay if he didn’t want to rush into it. He’d heard the word “undecided” applied to college applicants and it terrified him. He’d assumed that if you don’t declare a path before you go, you’re already failing. I told him that “undecided” is arguably the most honest answer someone his age can give.
In our house, we now have a very simple plan that isn’t actually a plan. As the year goes on, he’ll do some exploratory stuff that costs a couple hundred dollars instead of tens of thousands. He’s going to shadow a friend’s uncle who works in a lab. He’ll volunteer at a records store my brother-in-law owns, just to be around inventory and customer flow. He’s going to visit the big university with me on a random Tuesday, not for a formal tour, but just to walk around and feel how a campus works. We’ll grab a coffee and sit in the library for a while. Before I ever let him decide, I want him to feel whether it’s a place he actually likes, or just an obligation on an assembly line.
The practical insight here isn’t anything new to teachers or education researchers, but it’s hard to remember as a parent. Teenagers, especially around 15 or 16, are bad at projecting themselves into the future in a concrete way. They know a degree leads to “a job,” but not what that means on a rainy Tuesday morning on their commute. They also wrestle with this fear of being seen as a failure if they don’t go, because the messaging around “college is the golden ticket” starts early and never really wears off.
What works in our house, so far, is demystifying the decision. Now, when he asks what I think about university, I say something like, “I think it’s a tool. Not a prize or a punishment. And you should never take out a loan for a tool that you don’t know how to use yet.” It doesn’t sweep the whole thing into a neat conclusion.
We haven’t made a decision. He still doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. And honestly, I don’t know if he should go at age 18 or take a year off to stack shelves at the grocery store or start a certificate program or do something none of us are thinking of yet. What I do know is that we started by talking about it over a dirty dishwasher, and we kept talking about it in a car, without a single piece of paper with a definitive answer. We’re okay with that uncertainty. It might be the most honest thing we have.
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