Why university is still worth it for Christian parents and young people

I am the product of a parenting culture that followed the basic pattern of: finish school, go to university and get a job. It was tried, trusted, predictable and safe. It was a culture that treated university education as the most significant form of social capital to which a school leaver could meaningfully aspire.

It scarcely needs saying that the landscape has changed. If a young person can have a career “influencing” on social media, then university would seem like three wasted and irretrievable years. If, however, we dare to honestly survey how the landscape has changed, it becomes clear in my mind that the experience of university is more crucial than ever – even if it is for quite different reasons than the ones my mother and father proverbially rammed down my throat!

I would never advise you to send your child to university just to get a degree

The writer of Ecclesiastes intuitively put their finger on the underlying issue: I again saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning, nor favour to the skilful; for time and chance overtake them all (Ecclesiastes 9:11). The algorithm has stalled; former certainties have evaporated; fresh insight is required.

The predictability, safety, and security that once accompanied that most sacred highway from school to university to employment is, for all serious intents and purposes, non-existent. Our world has never been a less predictable, less secure, more economically nebulous and more confusing context for 18-year-olds to decide their life trajectory than it is now. What we read in Ecclesiastes is painfully true today: If no one knows what will happen, who can tell him when it will happen? No one has authority over the wind to restrain the wind, nor authority over the day of death; and there is no military discharge in the time of war, and evil will not save those who practice it (Ecclesiastes 8:7–8). In other words, we cannot, with our limited knowledge and capacity, control or manipulate tomorrow.

University is not (and probably has never really been) about a faultlessly smooth path into the ideal occupation but rather the necessary close infantry training for a world full of the uncertainty and unseen socio-political landmines articulated in Ecclesiastes – a world with many of the traditional guardrails removed (largely down to economic instability, increased automation, climate pressures and the like).

I strongly urge you to encourage your child to go to university to learn how to ask good, critical, informed, mature and wise questions

Whilst we have machines that can store and regurgitate data far more efficiently than the human brain, those core values which make up the human constitution cannot be downloaded from any website, programmed into a machine or determined from ChatGPT. University remains our most valuable institution for cultivating judgment, creativity, communicative prowess, networking, ethical discernment, critical independent thought, curiosity and wonder.

Even for those young people who are not tremendously academically minded, the university campus is an invaluable conduit between being a young, naïve dreamer and a young person first learning the significance of personal responsibility. It is still the place where youngsters can most happily learn time discipline, figure out administrative procedure without the help (or interference) of their parents or guardians, work out what drives, inspires and motivates them, deal with failure and disappointment, develop emotional intelligence, manage their finances and, perhaps most importantly, coexist with people who may see the world diametrically differently from themselves – and to quote the American writer Simon Sinek, “there is no app” for these sorts of skills and traits.

university is as much a creative, socially empowering and formative experience as it is (if not more so) a place to garner an education

Indeed, I might go so far as to say that the ability to have a peaceful and intelligent disagreement is likely to be one of the most precious talents of the modern era. Culturally, politically, spiritually and socially, university is typically so diverse a community, it acts as a developmental boot camp, and learning to navigate it can be beautifully transformative. Not only will the campus hone cultural sensitivity, but it may also introduce youngsters to potential networks they might have never otherwise considered – networks which could lead to future jobs or collaborations.

I am certainly not of the ilk that thinks everyone should go to university (I do wish more trade-focused and vocationally oriented courses could be taught in university settings - but that is perhaps an argument for another day). However, I resolutely stand by the notion that university is as much a creative, socially empowering and formative experience as it is (if not more so) a place to garner an education. It is a unique space for our young people to determine how they wish to show up in the world and be equipped with the requisite adaptability to navigate its uncertainty with reinvigorated confidence.

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There was a time when we came of age seeking answers. Increasingly, we come of age asking questions, and the better, more informed, more critical questions we ask, the more socially conscious, just and compassionate our societies will be (Ecclesiastes 7:10). Asking good questions is what changes the world - indeed, this is why I maintain that AI, at its utilitarian best, will always be the humble handmaiden of human social interaction and human learning. As a great poet once said, calculators did not make mathematics irrelevant – they simply changed what mathematicians needed to comprehend.

I would never advise you to send your child to university just to get a degree. However, I strongly urge you to encourage your child to go to university to learn how to ask good, critical, informed, mature and wise questions – that is, to stop judging by mere appearances and make the right judgment (John 7:24), to put away childish reasoning (1 Corinthians 13:11) and to allow testing to develop resilience (James 1:3–4). University is the pristine arena for developing such inquisitiveness, surrounded by people on the same path. It was once an arena where one might learn what American rap artist Positive K called “The skills that pay the bills”. It is so much more than that today - it is where one learns “the pearls that build the world”.