Is Going to University Right for You?
When I was young the goal of going to university and getting a degree was a non-negotiable and standard in life. However, given how much the world has changed since 2004, is going to university right for you?
My parents were immigrants to the US and neither of them graduated from university. Naturally, their goal was for their kids to do what they could not do. And in the 80’s and 90’s a degree was a requirement and necessity in order to get professional white collar jobs and generally succeed in life. All of this made a lot of sense and felt like the right thing to do.
That said, not everyone who attends university feels they have a reason to be there. In most cases that I knew of, those who didn’t have a reason simply didn’t know what they wanted. I was lucky in that I wanted to go to university – I craved learning and saw university as a place where I could learn just about anything I wanted.
I also had a goal of going into corporate business and moving up the ranks. University was an absolute requirement in order to do that. So it was a win-win all around for me. University was a place where I could check off a required box and satisfy any and all of my educational cravings.
The cost to pursue this step in my life was ultimately $25K a year (1999-2004). Not bad given today’s tuitions but not cheap either since I was an out-of-state student. Add in books and other expenses and I was on the hook for over $120,000 in student loans. My mom actually paid my first year tuition by cashing out her 401k.
I figured I would be paying student loans for 20 years (ultimately I paid everything off in 19 years), so I made the most of my years at university. I took the max number of credits nearly every semester. I took any and all classes I was curious about, even if they were not required for my degree. I loved it. When I paid the last student loan bill, I looked back and honestly felt no regrets because I wanted what university had to offer me.
A couple of years ago, the topic came up about university for my daughter who was not even a year old yet. And after some deep conversations about it, my wife and I concluded we wouldn’t require or mandate that our little girl go to university. We wouldn’t speak about university as a natural step after high school. Instead, we would consider it one of many means to her ends (i.e. goals and ambitions).
So why not encourage my own child to do something my parents worked so hard to unlock for me?
The cost has gone up significantly more than the value you get. Essentially, the only thing about university that has improved is the broadband speed. The academics are mostly the same. And yet the price has more than doubled since the early 2000’s. It’s like buying an iPhone 3 for the price of an iPhone 16 pro. That makes no sense, yet that’s what we are being sold.
There are many more alternatives to launching a successful career. Just look around at tech companies and how they brag about their youngest employees who didn’t even go to university. Or look at the companies that have dropped the university degree requirement. Look at all of the ways people learn now (i.e. YouTube university, online courses, books, bootcamps, etc.). When I started university in 1999, there weren’t really any other options for learning the things I needed to learn in order to qualify for the jobs I wanted. In the next 20 years, there will very likely be validated alternatives to university.
Universities don’t teach soft skills by design and they really matter in the world of AI. Universities for all their academic content and resources don’t teach soft skills. They don’t teach you to lead, to speak, to coach, to manage, to teach, to connect with others, at least not by design. They have opportunities for you to practice some of these skills if you choose to, but these are not by design. If you want to learn calculus III, you can learn that by taking a formal course and they might even have someone with world class skills teaching you. But if you want to learn how to network or speak or build relationships, they might offer a short seminar or opportunities to join student organizations or dedicated workshops taught by their own staff members who are likely not experts on the topic. I’ve seen this first hand from the inside while working at universities. And in the world of AI, where any entry-level roles and relevant hard skills could be done better by software or AI agents, soft skills are the only ones really left to set us apart.
After a few years, your results speak more for you and your career than your university brand name. So if you can get the results any other way, why not cut out the middle man? Don’t get me wrong, there will always be people who get super excited over hearing the names Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. However, we’re talking about a minority of situations.
Universities aren’t the quickest moving institutions and they may not have the latest and greatest resources for your chosen field. For instance, if you are pursuing a field that is fast-moving, radically shifting, and highly innovative, universities may not be the best path because they might move too slowly and your learnings might be obsolete by the time you graduate. One example is digital marketing. Digital marketing is field that leverages a lot of fast moving technology and is relatively new. Rarely can universities keep up with what’s actually happening in the real world when it comes to marketing. If you are passionate about this field and feel inspired to learn and get to work sooner rather than later, a university won’t be the way to go. Put another way, if blog articles written a few months ago can become obsolete, what does that mean for multi-year marketing degree curriculum? Unless you can find a university with a marketing program that is committed to teaching the latest and bleeding edge developments, you might be better off learning in the field from current professionals.
You’re ready to start your career NOW and don’t want to wait four years. There was a time when people launched their families and/or careers much sooner in life. If you can add value to a field and an organization, then your age doesn’t matter much. If you are a great writer at 18 and want to begin contributing to the field, no sense in waiting four years. That said, if attending university is still important to you (or your parents), you can still begin contributing to the field as a writer outside of your school work. Your school work should not limit your ability to create value, it should augment it.
When I went back to school to pursue a masters in psychology, I didn’t wait until graduation to start practicing executive coaching. I started as early as just a few months into my two year masters degree program. By the time I graduated, I had already put the skills I learned to practice on dozens of clients. I was ready and the masters program was meant to augment and accelerate my ability to get to market. Unfortunately, most people wait until graduation to begin testing out their new skills. I believe that’s too late if you want to be competitive and get to work doing something you love sooner rather than later. University isn’t an excuse to wait, you can make it an opportunity to start sooner!
So is going to university right for you?
If one or more of the following conditions are met, then it should move forward for further consideration.
Whatever you need to learn is best delivered and taught by a university. For instance, if you want to be a research scientist of some kind then universities can give you access to facilities, guidance, and equipment you might not otherwise be able to access easily. Some universities specialize in a career and those might be good reasons to attend them for that career. For example, Penn State University has invested a lot in becoming a farm for Wall Street talent. If you want to go to Wall Street, then going to Penn State is an effective path and likely worth the significant investment.
Your chosen profession is governed by an outside body that requires university degrees (i.e. medicine, accounting, law, and psychology). Some fields give you no choice. Notice I didn’t include engineering and education. The reason is that I believe those can be learned outside of a formal university if you are truly committed to learn these professions. If you can prove your talent most employers would have a hard time ignoring you and no legal reason to require a degree. This does not include public education where you do need official paperwork to teach. You can however teach in private schools, universities, and non-academic settings without a degree in the topic or a degree at all in some cases.
The ROI, after considering all costs including the opportunity cost of time (i.e. 4 years of university), makes sense for you. For me, that means being able to recover my university costs in 4-5 years. That means that after your living expenses, some fun-spending, and taxes each year, you should have left over one year’s worth of your average annual university cost. If your career cannot recover your university costs in 4-5 years, then I would reconsider the university option. We’re now seeing the extremely negative impacts of the student loan industry and how many Americans are trapped for decades paying mostly interest on their loans. You can easily end up paying 2-4x your actual university costs when you factor in interest. Best way to avoid this trap is to make sure you can pay off student loans quickly enough so that by your late 20’s you are completely free of student loans and able to make decisions free of financial constraints.
There are many ways to fix your ROI to meet this requirement. For example, you can plan to go back home to live with your parents (if that is available to you) and reduce your living expenses significantly for the first 4-5 years. This strategy might make the difference between getting to ROI in 4-5 years versus 8-10 years. You can secure college scholarships to lower your average annual cost. You can select a school in your state so that you qualify for in-state tuition which is generally lower. Bottom line, do whatever it takes to get to breakeven by no later than 4-5 years after graduation. If you can make that work then university might be right for you.
How will my wife and I handle our kids’ higher education?
Well, we’ll save some money for university. We estimate we’ll need at least half a million saved per child assuming that university prices double again in the next 20 years. So that’s $400k in tuition plus $100k for other related costs.
That said, we will ask our daughters what they want to do after high school. We’ll coach them on coming up with their own goals. If they have a goal that requires university, then great, we have some money saved to help them do that. If one of them says she has business ideas she’d like to test, then we’ll take the money saved, divide it and fund up to 10 venture attempts.
I teach entrepreneurship and I know that if provided with coaching, funding, and support, someone will figure it out by 10 tries.
If she needs a break to learn more about herself, we’ll consider funding one discovery year and then helping her figure out a plan to self-fund any subsequent years (if necessary).
If she wants to pursue a career that requires training, we’ll help her consider all of her options because by then, there will be even more ways to prepare yourself for a career.
There are many alternatives to going to a four-year university, here are a few.
What’s the Moral of the Story?
Simply put, going to university should not be an end. It’s a means to an end. If you don’t know the end, then you cannot know the means. And if you do know your goals then consider all possible alternatives, consequences, and opportunities before choosing one. For several decades, we’ve been simply picking the university option without question and that has not worked out for many people.
Don’t let anyone tell you what your goal should be. That is your decision to make. Not too long ago people told kids to learn how to code. That advice didn’t age very well and 10 years later entry level (and even more advanced) coding can be done by AI. No need for entry level coders anymore. It doesn’t make sense for companies to spend money on them unless they can do better than AI. Kids who followed that advice in middle school are now paying the price for misguided predictions and speculation about the future. Decide on your own goals, it’s your life after all. Then figure out how to get there.
Don’t forget, university is one of many means. It is not the end.
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