Why is university important besides getting a job? A teacher’s perspective
Last week I sat across from a mom and her 17-year-old daughter at my desk in the high school guidance office, the fluorescent lights humming, a half-eaten peanut butter granola bar from the vending machine melting into the corner of my desk pad. The daughter, Lila, wants to major in art history. Her mom leaned forward, tapped Lila’s transcript with one manicured finger, and said what I hear at least three times a week: “I just don’t understand why we’d pay four years of tuition if it doesn’t lead to a steady job.”
Lila picked at the drawstring of her faded gray hoodie and said she didn’t even know what job she wanted yet. When she did a project on Frida Kahlo for her AP art class last year, she stayed up three nights reading about how Kahlo’s work tied to the Mexican revolution, and it made her look at the new murals downtown differently. She just wanted to learn more about that. Her mom sighed and said that was nice, but it wasn’t a career.
I didn’t jump in with a canned answer right away, because I was already thinking of Mia, a student who graduated from here 12 years ago, who I meet for coffee every summer when she’s back visiting her parents. Mia majored in classics. Back then, everyone told her the same thing: what are you going to do with that? She’s now the operations manager at a popular craft brewery an hour outside the city. Last summer, she stirred her iced latte and told me that the most useful thing she learned in university was how to sort through messy, incomplete information to find what matters. For her senior thesis, she spent three months comparing 500-year-old fragments of pottery from a dig in southern England, cross-checking different accounts of where each fragment was found, sorting out which researchers had bias and which data was solid. Now, when the brewery has a problem with a tap list that underperformed, or a schedule conflict between three weekend event rentals, that’s exactly what she does. She doesn’t panic, she doesn’t take the first loud complaint at face value, she sorts through the details to find the actual issue. No one taught that to her for her entry-level operations job, she said. She picked it up slow, over four years, working on something that didn’t have any obvious connection to running a brewery.
That’s the part most parents miss when they only talk about university as job training. It’s not just about the degree you hang on the wall or the starting salary you get right after graduation. It’s four years of practice working through hard problems that don’t have clear answers, of getting told you’re wrong and having to adjust your thinking, of showing up for work when no one is forcing you to turn in the assignment. A lot of kids get that for the first time at university. It’s the first time they live away from home, set their own schedule, figure out how to ask for help when they’re stuck instead of having a parent step in. I’ve seen kids who went straight to full-time work after high school end up enrolling in college classes 5 or 10 years later just to get that experience of standing on their own two feet in a learning space.
When I talk to parents after these conversations, I don’t give them vague speeches about following your dreams. I give them two small, concrete things to try. First, shift your opening question. Instead of leading with “what job will you get with that major?” ask “what’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned about this subject so far?” It sounds small, but it changes the whole conversation from “is this a waste of money?” to “what is my kid getting out of this?” Second, if you can, let them test the interest before they commit. Lila did a two-week summer program at the local state university for high school artists last year, so she knew she actually liked the academic side of art history, not just browsing museum gift shops. That took a lot of the edge off her mom’s worry, because it wasn’t just a random teenage whim.
It’s also okay if your kid’s degree never lines up directly with their job. Most of the former students I’ve kept in touch with don’t work in their major 10 years after graduation. That’s not a waste, that’s how life works. The skills you build learning something you care about stick with you even if you never use the major-specific facts again. My neighbor’s daughter studied anthropology, now she sells real estate. She told me that learning how to talk to people from all different backgrounds and figure out what they actually want, instead of just what they say they want, is what makes her better than half the other agents in town.
Lila and her mom left my office last week with a plan: Lila will major in art history, add a business minor to cover some basics, and work part-time at the campus museum to get experience. I got a quick email from her last week, she moved into the dorms last month, and just got back from a field trip to a big museum in Chicago. She said she spent three hours standing in front of one impressionist painting, and her professor pointed out a tiny detail about the brushwork that no one else in the group noticed, and it made her see the whole work differently. She still doesn’t know what job she’s going to have when she graduates. Her mom still texts me once in a while to ask if I think it’s the right choice.
I tell her what I tell everyone: I don’t know what the future holds. No one does. But four years of learning how to think, how to adjust when you’re wrong, how to find things that matter to you, that’s not a waste. It pays off in a hundred small ways every day, long after the graduation party is over, whether it leads straight to your dream job or not.
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