What Is the Point of University? A Parent’s Honest Perspective After Raising Two Grads
I’m folding a pile of faded college hoodies at my kitchen table last Sunday, half watching a rerun of a cooking show, when my 19-year-old Lila pauses her TikTok scroll and leans forward. The half-eaten bowl of cheese puffs next to her teeters, and our golden retriever nudges my hand for a bite before she speaks. “Mom, what’s even the point of university, anyway?”
That’s not the first time I’ve heard that question. Three years ago, my oldest Jake got asked the same thing by my cousin at his graduation barbecue. “Wasted all that money just to plant trees and mow lawns, huh?” he’d clapped Jake on the back, like he was telling a harmless joke. Jake just wiped grill grease off his hands and shrugged, said “Nah, wasn’t wasted.”
Jake was the kid who slept through first period in high school, turned in assignments five minutes before the deadline, and never once talked about a dream career after graduation. We never pressured him to go to university, but we never ruled it out either. He applied to a handful of state schools, picked one a few hundred miles away because it had a decent environmental program, and he wanted to be far enough that we couldn’t drop by unannounced. First semester, he got a D in general chemistry, failed his first stats quiz three times, and called me at 2 a.m. crying saying he was too stupid for this and should come home. I drove out the next weekend, helped him change his schedule, dropped the chem, and he signed up for an introductory botany class and joined the campus outdoor club instead.
He worked 20 hours a week at the campus coffee shop, learned to split a $300 grocery bill with three roommates, learned to evict a raccoon from his off-campus cabin, learned to negotiate a shift swap when he wanted to go on a weekend hiking trip. When he graduated, he took that entry-level office job everyone told him was the “point” of his degree. He quit after eight months, said he couldn’t handle sitting inside staring at a screen all day. He came back home, got a job with a local landscaping company that specializes in native plant restoration, and now he’s saving up to start his own small business doing that work.
Lila is the opposite: she was honor roll, always turned her homework in on time, but when she graduated high school she said she didn’t want to go to a four-year school right away. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, and she wasn’t going to take on $50,000 of debt just to pick a major at random. She’s going to community college part-time, working 20 hours a week at the local vet clinic, and she’s been taking general ed classes while she figures out if vet tech is actually what she wants. That’s why she’s asking the question now—one of her high school friends dropped out of university last semester and is already making $18 an hour as an apprentice electrician, and she’s wondering if she’s wasting time.
I used to parrot the same line everyone else does, that university increases your lifetime earning potential, that it opens doors. But after watching both my kids, I think we’ve been asking the wrong question. We talk about university like it’s a product you buy, that’s supposed to hand you a specific, high-paying job at the end. But for most kids I know, that’s not what it is, not anymore.
When your kid asks you this question, you don’t have to start with statistics. First, just ask them back: “What do you want to get out of the next few years that you can’t get right where you are?” If your kid wants to be a nurse or an engineer, the answer is obvious: you need the degree to get the license. But if they don’t know what they want, the point doesn’t have to be the framed diploma on the wall. It can be two or four years of low-stakes trial and error away from your childhood bedroom, where the worst thing that happens is you fail a class and change your major. That trial and error is a lot cheaper when you’re 20 than when you’re 35, stuck in a career you hate with a mortgage to pay.
Another thing I tell other parents is to write down what you can actually afford to pay upfront, and tell your kid that number clearly. Don’t beat around the bush, don’t take on second mortgages or let them take on six figures of debt just because everyone says you have to go to university right after high school. It’s totally fine to start at community college part-time while working, or take a semester off to test out a line of work before you commit to a degree. That’s not giving up, that’s being smart with your money and your time.
When I asked Jake a few months back if he thought his degree was worth it, he said he still uses the plant identification skills he learned in those botany classes every single day. He said that living on his own for four years taught him how to fix a leaky faucet, how to file his taxes, how to talk down an upset customer when he messed up a garden design. Those are things he wouldn’t have learned if he’d just gone straight to work right after high school, living at home with us handling all that stuff for him.
Lila told me yesterday she’s thinking of taking next semester off from classes to work full time at the vet clinic, to make sure she actually likes the work enough to get the degree for it. I didn’t panic, I didn’t tell her she was throwing her future away. I just said we’d adjust her payment plan for the classes she’s already taken, and that it’s a good idea to check before you commit. Some months I look at the student loan statements sitting in our kitchen drawer, and I wonder if we did the right thing. Other times, Jake brings over a jar of wild honey he got from a beekeeper he met on that college hiking trip, and I don’t wonder anymore. The point isn’t always the degree. It’s just the time to figure out what you actually want, before you have to build your whole life around it. That’s worth something, even if it doesn’t look the way everyone expected it to.
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