Why is university education important beyond getting a job? A teacher’s perspective
The football team’s practice whistles drifted through my open classroom window last month during Mia Carter’s parent-teacher conference, mixing with the smell of dry-erase marker and the half-eaten granola bar I’d left on my desk that morning. Mia’s mom leaned across the table, twisting her wedding band back and forth, and asked the question I get at least three times a semester now: “If she already has steady graphic design clients lined up right out of high school, what’s the point of paying for four years of university if it’s just to get a job?”
Mia picked at a loose thread on her sunflower hoodie, staring at her scuffed white sneakers. She’d been selling custom stickers and brand kits to small local businesses for a year already, pulling in an extra $300 to $400 a month, enough to cover her gas and phone bill. Her mom, an ER nurse who’d worked nights for 18 years to build their savings, had a point. Tuition isn’t cheap, and no one wants to throw money at something that doesn’t feel like it has a clear payoff.
I told her about my nephew Luka, who graduated high school five years ago with the same plan: skip university, do what he loved full time right away. Luka had been building furniture in our family’s garage since he was 16, and he had a steady stream of Etsy orders for custom dining tables before he even walked at graduation. He said all the information he needed was on YouTube, that university was just a waste of four years you could spend working and making money. For two years, it worked. He worked six days a week, paid for all his own tools, and even put a little money in savings.
Then he decided he wanted to expand. He found a 1,000 square foot shop space to rent outside of town, and wanted to hire a part-time kid from the high school to help with sanding and deliveries. That’s when he hit the small walls no YouTube tutorial had really prepared him for. He couldn’t parse the 12-page commercial lease the landlord handed him, and a local lawyer wanted $800 just to read it over. He couldn’t figure out how to file payroll taxes for his new employee, and kept getting confusing letters from the state revenue department. When he reached out to local architects to pitch custom cabinet work for new home builds, he didn’t have any connection to the industry—all his contacts were his Etsy customers and people he’d gone to high school with.
He ended up signing up for two part-time classes at the local state university: introductory business law and interior design. It cost him less than $1,200 that semester, far less than the lawyer would have charged just for the lease review. In his law class, he met a sophomore pre-law student who looked over his lease for the price of a coffee and helped him negotiate a better exit clause. In his design class, he sat next to an adjunct professor who ran his own architecture firm in town, and six months later that professor started sending Luka custom cabinet work—four or five projects a month, three times what Luka was making on Etsy alone.
That’s the part I try to explain to parents that we don’t talk about much. University isn’t just a credential you trade for a job. It’s a space where you can learn small, useful things that don’t show up on TikTok or YouTube tutorials, when the stakes are still lower than they are when you’re already working full time. When you’re 19, you can mess up a group project, drop a class mid-semester, or change your entire focus without risking your rent or your job. When you start full-time work right out of high school, your employer expects you to produce from day one—you don’t get much space to mess around and learn something that doesn’t immediately make the company money.
It’s also the only time most of us will ever live and work around such a wide range of people with different goals. If you start working full time as a graphic designer at 18, most of the people you spend time with are other people in design, or people you went to high school with. At university, you end up living next door to a pre-med student, a forestry major, and a retired mechanic going back to school to study history. You get perspectives you’d never stumble on working full time in your chosen field. For Mia, that means she can take a botany class for fun and leave with a whole new line of native plant stickers that’s already her top seller.
What I tell parents who ask is this: you don’t have to push your kid to go full time right out of high school, and you don’t have to demand they pick a major that only points to one specific job. Let them take one class a semester that has nothing to do with their career goal, if that’s what they want. If they already have work they love, they can go part time while they keep working, instead of skipping it entirely. You don’t have to count the payoff only in salary.
Mia stopped by my classroom after school last week, she’d just sent in her application to the state university’s art program, with a minor in creative writing. Her mom agreed to let her go, as long as she keeps her freelance clients on the side. Luka still takes one class a semester, even after finishing his associate’s degree. Last semester it was ornithology, because he likes to go birding on weekends. He says it’s made him notice the grain and texture of different trees more, and that makes his tables better. I don’t know what Mia will end up doing with her poetry minor, or if it’ll ever show up on a resume. But that’s okay. Not every good thing about university has to end in a job.
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