What Is The Point Of University? Honest Perspective For Parents Of Teens
The coffee in my mug had gone cold, and I was shoving crumpled conference sign-in sheets into my tote when Mrs. Lopez hovered in my 12th grade classroom door, twisting her minivan key fob around her finger. She’d come in earlier to talk about her son Javi, who’d spent most of first semester editing college application essays between troubleshooting 3D prints for his classmates. Now she leaned against the doorframe, voice quiet. “He told me last night he doesn’t want to go. He says he can get an apprenticeship in industrial design right out of high school, and what’s the point of wasting all that money on a degree anyway. My husband says he’s throwing his future away. I don’t know what to think.”
I didn’t give her the polished school district line about higher education opening every door. Instead, I thought of my older brother Ethan. When I was 14 and he was 24, he moved back home after dropping out of his junior year at our state university. My parents had spent 18 years saving that tuition, telling him a degree was the only way to avoid a dead-end job. Ethan had been building decks for neighbors since he was 16, rewired our entire basement when he was 17, and told me once he’d rather measure lumber than write research papers any day. He carried that dropout guilt for a decade. He turned down multiple opportunities to grow his side business because he thought he wasn’t “qualified” without a piece of paper. Now he owns a custom home building company outside Portland, employs 12 people, and makes twice what I make as a high school teacher. But we still don’t talk much about those two years of wasted tuition and self-doubt.
I told Mrs. Lopez the point of university isn’t one-size-fits-all. For some people, it’s non-negotiable: if you want to be a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, a lawyer, or a research scientist, you need that credential, there’s no way around it. But for a lot of kids, it’s become a default step we take just because it’s what comes after high school, not because it fits what they actually want to do.
I gave her two small, concrete things she could do that week to work through the question, no expensive career counseling or big family fights required. First, sit down with Javi and her husband, and each person write down three concrete 5-year outcomes for both paths: the apprenticeship, and four-year university. Write down the actual numbers for tuition, debt, expected pay, and work experience, don’t just rely on vague feelings. Second, ask Javi one straight question: what do you think university will give you that your other option won’t? If he can’t answer it beyond “that’s what people do” or “what you want me to do”, that’s a good sign it’s not the right fit right now.
I had a student a few years back, Mia, who was dead set on going to an out-of-state private school for a creative writing degree. When we walked through that exercise together, she realized she wanted to be a young adult author, and the only thing the four-year degree would give her was four years to write and $80,000 in student debt. She opted to stay local, do an associate’s degree in communications for two years, work part-time at a local independent bookstore, and write in her spare time. She just got her first book deal last year, and she has less than $10,000 in debt. That outcome worked far better for her than the default four-year path would have.
Most parents I talk to get nervous about straying from the university path because when they were 18, not going meant settling for less. That was true 30 years ago, but the job market has shifted a lot. Today, a lot of kids graduate with a bachelor’s degree and tens of thousands in debt, and still don’t know what they want to do. Trades and technical apprenticeships often pay well enough to buy a house in your 20s, which is something most 22-year-old grads with debt can’t pull off. And if your kid changes their mind five years down the line, they can always go to university then. Most schools accept adult students, and they’ll have a far clearer idea of what they want to study when they get there, so they’re less likely to waste time and money switching majors.
A week after our conversation, Mrs. Lopez emailed me an update. She and her husband sat down with Javi and walked through the 5-year outcomes just like I suggested. They found out the apprenticeship Javi wants is run through the local community college: it’s three years, costs $8,000 total, and he gets paid $15 an hour while he trains. At the end, he gets a full-time job offer with a $55,000 starting salary. If he went to four-year state school for industrial design, he’d be looking at around $45,000 in debt, and a starting salary around the same $55,000. Javi answered that straight question easily: he said university would teach him some of the same design stuff, but he’d rather learn on the job and start building his career five years earlier.
Her husband is still a little nervous. He still brings up “what if he changes his mind” at dinner. But Mrs. Lopez said that even if he does, it’s not the end of the world. Javi has been spending every night after school updating his design portfolio, and he hasn’t complained about senioritis once in two weeks. I told her that’s a pretty good sign, even if it’s not the neat, expected path everyone plans for. There’s no single right point of university for everyone. It’s only worth it if it’s the right answer for your kid.
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