Imagine being seventeen or eighteen and reaching that strange point in life when people suddenly expect you to make decisions that could shape the next forty years, even though you may still have only a vague idea of what you actually want those forty years to look like. Teachers begin asking what you intend to study, parents talk about universities and careers, friends compare courses and acceptance letters, and before long the question isn’t really whether you should go to university at all, but which university you should attend and what degree you should choose.
For generations, there was nothing particularly unreasonable about this advice. A university degree offered access to specialised knowledge, professional careers and employers that might otherwise have remained beyond reach, while also providing a powerful signal that the person holding it had demonstrated a certain level of ability and discipline. Parents who had watched education transform people’s lives understandably wanted their children to have the same opportunity, and over time a perfectly sensible piece of advice — get yourself a good education — gradually hardened into something closer to a social rule.
Finish school, go to university, earn the qualification and then begin your career. Follow those steps and, while nothing was guaranteed, you had at least followed the path that responsible and ambitious people were expected to take.
The interesting thing is that the world surrounding that advice has changed dramatically while the advice itself has proved remarkably resistant to change. Knowledge that once required access to lecture theatres, specialist libraries and university professors can now be reached from a laptop almost anywhere in the world. Entire careers have emerged that barely existed a generation ago, while people are building businesses, portfolios, audiences and professional reputations through routes that would once have seemed unconventional or simply impossible.
At the same time, employers in many industries have acquired something they didn’t previously have: the ability to see what a person can actually do. A programmer can point to software she has built, a designer can present a portfolio, a filmmaker can show finished work, a marketer can demonstrate campaigns and results, and an entrepreneur can point to customers who have already paid for something they created. A qualification can still be a valuable signal of ability, but increasingly it isn’t the only signal available.
None of this means university has become irrelevant, nor does it mean that an eighteen-year-old would necessarily be better off skipping it. For medicine, engineering, law and many other professions, formal higher education remains essential or enormously valuable, while university can provide intellectual depth, friendships, networks and experiences that are difficult to reproduce through an online course or a collection of YouTube videos.
The question, then, isn’t whether university is good or bad. That is far too simplistic.
The more interesting question is why, when the range of ways to learn, work and build a career has expanded so dramatically, we still so often treat one particular route as the default. Perhaps instead of automatically asking a young person “What are you going to study?”, we should first be asking “What are you trying to become, and what is the best way of getting there?”
University may still turn out to be the answer. It just shouldn’t get to be the answer before we’ve asked the question.
The expectation that ambitious young people should attend university didn’t emerge because previous generations were unimaginative or blindly obedient. Quite the opposite: for much of the twentieth century, higher education offered access to things that were genuinely difficult to obtain elsewhere, including specialised knowledge, professional networks, respected employers and careers that could transform not only an individual’s prospects but sometimes those of an entire family.
As economies shifted and professional work expanded, a degree became increasingly valuable as both an education and a passport. Employers needed ways of identifying capable candidates, and a university qualification provided a convenient signal that someone had reached an accepted academic standard, possessed specialised knowledge and had demonstrated the perseverance required to complete several years of study. For many families, particularly those whose parents or grandparents had never had the opportunity to attend university themselves, seeing the next generation graduate represented genuine social and economic progress.
It isn’t difficult to understand how a pathway that worked so well for so many people eventually became embedded in the culture. Parents encouraged it, schools prepared students for it, employers rewarded it and governments promoted it, until university gradually became more than one possible route into adult life. For many young people, it became the route against which all the alternatives were judged.
That distinction matters because many of the unwritten rules we live by didn’t begin as bad ideas. They began as sensible responses to the circumstances of their time and became problematic only when we continued following them after those circumstances had changed.
Higher education may now be experiencing exactly that problem. The degree itself hasn’t suddenly become worthless, but the environment in which its value was established has changed enormously, and alternatives that once barely existed have become increasingly credible.
The rule remained the same while the world around it moved on.
For most of the period in which the university degree established itself as the safest route into professional life, access to knowledge was scarce. If you wanted to learn from recognised experts, use specialist equipment, study advanced material or gain entry to certain professional networks, there were only so many places you could go. Universities didn’t simply issue qualifications; they controlled access to resources, people and information that were extremely difficult for someone outside the institution to obtain.
That world has changed almost beyond recognition. A young person sitting at home today has access to libraries of information that would have been unimaginable to a student a generation ago, along with online courses, specialist communities, professional software and direct access to people working in industries they may eventually want to enter. Someone interested in programming can begin writing software before ever applying to university, while an aspiring filmmaker can learn to shoot and edit, publish work to a global audience and gradually build a portfolio without first being accepted into film school. A designer can learn professional tools and demonstrate what they can do through finished work, while someone fascinated by business can launch a small online venture and discover what customers actually want before sitting through their first marketing lecture.
None of this means that access to information is the same as acquiring expertise. The internet contains extraordinary teachers and terrible ones, rigorous courses and superficial shortcuts, while having thousands of tutorials available doesn’t provide the discipline required to work through them. Universities can offer something that independent learning often struggles to reproduce: structure, intellectual challenge, feedback, laboratories and specialist facilities, experienced academics, classmates working toward similar goals and an environment in which learning is expected rather than squeezed into whatever time remains after everything else.
What has changed isn’t the value of learning, but the number of places in which serious learning can occur.
There has also been another important shift. Employers in many fields no longer have to rely entirely on a qualification as a proxy for someone’s ability because technology increasingly allows people to demonstrate what they can actually do. A programmer can show software she has built, a designer can present a portfolio, a filmmaker can show finished work, a writer can point to published articles and an entrepreneur can demonstrate that real customers have already paid for something they created.
A degree remains a powerful signal in many industries, but it now competes with signals that barely existed when the traditional university pathway became entrenched. That doesn’t make the degree obsolete; it simply means that, for some careers, it no longer enjoys the monopoly it once did.
And just as we are beginning to adjust to that change, something much bigger has arrived.
A student beginning university today faces a problem that would have been difficult for previous generations to imagine. They aren’t simply trying to decide which profession will suit them; they are trying to make that decision while artificial intelligence and other technologies are beginning to alter the professions themselves.
Someone starting a four-year degree in 2026 will enter the graduate workforce around 2030. Trying to predict exactly what many occupations will look like by then is becoming increasingly difficult, because AI isn’t only automating repetitive physical work in the way earlier waves of technology often did. It is increasingly capable of performing parts of the work associated with educated professionals, from writing and research to software development, design, data analysis, accounting and aspects of legal and administrative work.
That doesn’t necessarily mean those professions are disappearing. History repeatedly shows that technologies can eliminate certain tasks while creating new ones, and occupations often change rather than simply vanish. What it does mean is that choosing a degree based solely on the employment market that exists when you enrol may be less reliable than it once was.
This creates an uncomfortable question for anyone considering several years of specialised study. If technology can substantially change a profession during the time it takes to qualify for it, shouldn’t part of the decision involve asking what that profession might look like when you graduate, rather than simply what it looks like today?
Artificial intelligence is also changing the other side of the educational equation: how people learn in the first place. For the first time, someone learning independently can have something resembling a personal tutor available whenever they need it, capable of explaining a difficult concept in another way, creating exercises at an appropriate level, helping them practise a language, critiquing their writing or guiding them through unfamiliar technical material. AI is far from infallible, and anyone using it seriously needs to learn how to question its answers and verify important information, but the direction of travel is difficult to ignore. The tools available to someone who wants to teach themselves are becoming extraordinarily powerful.
There is a paradox here. At precisely the moment when technology is making some forms of knowledge easier and cheaper to acquire outside traditional institutions, it may also be making genuinely good education more important. If AI can produce competent writing, computer code, images and analysis on demand, simply possessing information or knowing how to perform a routine task may become less distinctive. The qualities that become more valuable could instead be judgement, creativity, curiosity, communication, critical thinking, the ability to recognise when an answer is wrong and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to keep learning as the tools around you change.
A good university education can absolutely help develop those qualities. So can an exceptional apprenticeship, an ambitious personal project, starting a business, working alongside talented people or spending years becoming deeply knowledgeable about something outside formal education. Once again, the interesting question isn’t which institution wins. It is which environment will best develop the capabilities someone is actually going to need.
Perhaps that is the biggest change AI introduces into the university decision. An eighteen-year-old may no longer be choosing an education that prepares them for a relatively stable profession they will practise in roughly the same way for forty years. They may instead be preparing for a working life in which professions repeatedly change, new tools appear, some skills lose value and others become important almost overnight.
In that world, the most valuable qualification may not simply be evidence that you learned something once. It may be evidence that you know how to keep learning.
Against that rapidly changing backdrop, the financial question becomes harder to ignore, although it is important not to reduce the argument to the enormous student-debt figures that dominate discussion in countries such as the United States. Higher education is funded very differently around the world, and for some students the direct financial burden will be far smaller than for others. Yet every student pays one cost that doesn’t appear on a loan statement: time.
Three, four or five years devoted to a degree can be an extraordinary investment. Those years may provide knowledge, friendships, independence, networks and experiences that shape the rest of someone’s life, which is why describing them simply as a “cost” would miss much of what university can offer. Nevertheless, those same years could also have been spent working inside an industry, completing an apprenticeship, travelling, building a business, developing a portfolio or experimenting with several possible careers before committing to one.
Imagine two eighteen-year-olds who are equally interested in the same rapidly changing industry. One chooses university and spends the next four years developing theoretical knowledge, learning from academics, meeting other ambitious students and earning a respected qualification. The other enters the industry at the bottom, studies independently in the evenings, experiments with new technologies as they appear and spends four years accumulating practical experience and relationships.
When they meet again at twenty-two, there is no reason to assume that either one must be ahead.
The graduate may possess knowledge and opportunities that would have been extremely difficult to acquire independently, while the other person may have four years of practical experience, a portfolio of completed work and an intimate understanding of how the industry actually operates. Depending on the profession, one route might prove dramatically better than the other, or the smartest answer may turn out to have been some combination of both.
That is precisely the point. We have traditionally treated one of those young people as following the recognised path while describing the other as taking a risk, when in a rapidly changing economy both of them are making a bet about the future.
The question worth asking isn’t whether university costs too much or takes too long. It is whether the particular education being considered is likely to justify the money, time and opportunities being invested in it. For someone determined to become a doctor, the answer may be straightforward. For someone considering a broad degree largely because they don’t yet know what else to do, the calculation deserves considerably more thought.
And perhaps that is where the old rule becomes most dangerous. University can be an excellent place to go when you have a reason for being there, but spending several formative years following a path simply because everyone around you expects you to follow it is something quite different.
The problem with inherited rules isn't that they were always foolish. It's that the world can change faster than the rule does.
When Steve Jobs arrived at Reed College in Oregon in 1972, going to university wasn’t simply something he had decided to do. Education had been woven into his story before he was old enough to understand what university was. His biological mother had wanted him adopted by college-educated parents and, when that didn’t happen, his adoptive parents promised that he would eventually attend college. Seventeen years later, Paul and Clara Jobs were spending much of the money they had saved to keep that promise.
The problem was that Jobs had very little idea what he wanted to do with the education they were paying for. He had chosen an expensive private college, couldn’t see how the required classes were helping him discover what he wanted from life, and became increasingly uncomfortable watching his parents’ savings disappear while he followed a path whose destination he couldn’t yet see.
After one semester, he dropped out.
That sentence has become part of the mythology surrounding Jobs, and it is tempting to turn it into the familiar story of the brilliant entrepreneur who rejected university, built Apple and proved that formal education didn’t matter. But what happened next is much more interesting than the dropout legend, because Jobs didn’t actually walk away from education. He walked away from the obligation to study subjects simply because they appeared on a curriculum.
For roughly the next eighteen months he remained around Reed, sleeping on friends’ floors, returning bottles for money and dropping into classes that interested him without having to complete the requirements of a degree. Freed from the need to take compulsory courses, he wandered into a calligraphy class and became fascinated by the details of typography: the spaces between letters, the proportions of different typefaces and the almost artistic care that went into making words beautiful on a page.
At the time, it had no obvious practical value. Jobs wasn’t studying graphic design and there was no career plan in which calligraphy represented the next logical step. It was simply something he found beautiful and wanted to understand.
About a decade later, when Apple was developing the Macintosh, that apparently useless detour suddenly became useful. Jobs drew on what he had learned at Reed when thinking about the way type should appear on a computer screen, helping make the Macintosh notable for its typography at a time when personal computers were still overwhelmingly utilitarian machines. Looking back years later, he acknowledged that there would have been no way to justify taking that calligraphy class by looking forward from the position of a college dropout. Its importance only became apparent when he looked backwards and saw how the pieces had connected.
That is what makes the story relevant here. The lesson isn’t that Steve Jobs dropped out of university and therefore other people should do the same, any more than his later success proves that abandoning a degree is a reliable route to becoming a billionaire. Jobs was an extraordinary outlier, and using people like him as evidence that university doesn’t matter would be every bit as simplistic as claiming that everyone needs a degree because many successful people have one.
The more useful lesson is that education and credentialing are not necessarily the same thing. Jobs rejected the structure of his formal education while continuing to learn intensely, following curiosity into an area that nobody could have identified as useful to his future career because the career itself barely existed yet.
There is something particularly relevant about that story now. A young person entering university today may eventually work in an occupation that hasn’t yet been invented, using technology that doesn’t yet exist to solve problems nobody currently knows they have. In that environment, the ability to follow curiosity, connect ideas from different disciplines and continue learning long after formal education ends may prove at least as important as the knowledge acquired while earning the original qualification.
Jobs’ story doesn’t tell us to abandon university. It tells us something more valuable :
Never confuse following a curriculum with learning.
Steve Jobs is hardly the only famous person whose life took an unexpected turn away from the conventional educational route. Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard while Facebook was still an emerging project and moved west to build the company. Richard Branson struggled within traditional schooling, left at sixteen and began publishing Student magazine before going on to build the Virgin businesses. There are plenty of other examples, although lists of billionaire dropouts often obscure more than they reveal.
The obvious problem is survivorship bias. We know the names of the people who left school or university and became spectacularly successful precisely because their outcomes were spectacular. We don’t hear nearly as much about the people who abandoned education, struggled to establish themselves and later wished they had completed a qualification. Telling an eighteen-year-old to drop out because Steve Jobs did would therefore be terrible advice.
But dismissing all these unconventional careers as irrelevant exceptions misses something too. The important question isn’t whether dropping out caused their success, because in most cases there is little reason to believe it did. The more interesting question is why formal credentials weren’t ultimately necessary for them to demonstrate their value.
They built things.
Jobs helped build computers people wanted to own. Zuckerberg built a social network people wanted to use. Branson created businesses people were willing to buy from. Their work generated evidence of ability that eventually became far more powerful than any missing qualification could have been.
For most people, the evidence will obviously be less dramatic, but the underlying principle is becoming increasingly relevant. A software developer doesn’t need to create the next Apple to demonstrate competence; she may be able to show an employer applications she has already built. A photographer can present years of finished work, a digital marketer can demonstrate campaigns and measurable results, while someone wanting to enter business may arrive with experience gained from actually finding customers, selling products and discovering how unforgiving the difference can be between an idea that sounds good and one somebody will pay for.
Technology has made that kind of proof much easier to create, distribute and evaluate. It has also made it possible for people to begin accumulating evidence of what they can do much earlier, sometimes while they are still studying. That creates an option previous generations didn’t always have: instead of choosing between education and experience, it is increasingly possible to build both at the same time.
A university student can launch a business, contribute to open-source software, create films, undertake freelance projects or use AI and other emerging technologies to experiment in fields outside the boundaries of a degree. Equally, someone who chooses not to attend university can continue studying through online courses, professional qualifications, mentors and increasingly sophisticated AI learning tools. The dividing line between “student” and “worker” is becoming less clear, which is another reason the old argument about whether university is universally worthwhile is beginning to feel too narrow.
Perhaps the better question isn’t whether someone has chosen the traditional path or the unconventional one. It is whether, whichever path they choose, they are actually building capability along the way.
After all of that, it would be easy to swing too far in the opposite direction and conclude that technology has made universities unnecessary. It hasn’t, and pretending otherwise would simply replace one rigid rule with another.
There are professions in which formal higher education remains indispensable. Nobody should choose a surgeon because she built an impressive online portfolio after watching medical tutorials, and society has good reasons for requiring rigorous education, supervised training and professional accreditation before allowing someone to operate on another human being. Similar considerations apply across many areas of medicine, engineering, architecture, law and other regulated professions, although the exact requirements vary between countries.
Even outside those fields, university can provide advantages that are surprisingly difficult to reproduce independently. A talented professor can do far more than transfer information; they can challenge assumptions, identify weaknesses in someone’s reasoning and expose students to ideas they would never have thought to search for themselves. Laboratories, specialist facilities and research environments may be impossible to recreate at home, while spending several years surrounded by people studying different subjects can produce friendships, collaborations and intellectual collisions whose value doesn’t appear anywhere on a course description.
There is also something to be said for structure. The freedom to learn anything online sounds wonderful until Tuesday evening arrives, you’re tired after work and nobody cares whether you complete the next lesson. Universities impose deadlines, standards, assessment and accountability, and although students may complain about all four, they are often part of what turns casual interest into genuine competence.
AI doesn’t remove that advantage either. Having access to a tool capable of explaining almost any subject is not the same as knowing which questions are worth asking, whether the answer is reliable or what important knowledge you haven’t thought to request. One of the risks of an increasingly personalised learning environment is that people can become exceptionally efficient at following their existing interests while remaining unaware of the ideas that would have challenged them. A thoughtfully designed education can force someone into unfamiliar territory, and sometimes the subject you never would have chosen for yourself turns out to be the one that changes the way you think. Steve Jobs’ calligraphy class is, ironically, a good example.
So the argument against treating university as the automatic choice should never become an argument against university itself. For some people, it will remain unquestionably the best route; for others, it will be valuable for reasons they cannot possibly anticipate when they enrol.
The change is simply that university now has to compete with alternatives that are becoming better, cheaper and more accessible, and that means the decision deserves more thought than the old instruction to get a degree and work everything else out afterwards.
For much of the twentieth century, one of the most valuable things a university provided wasn’t something students could see in a lecture theatre. It was a signal to the outside world. Before an employer knew anything else about an applicant, a degree could suggest that this person had reached a recognised academic standard, possessed specialist knowledge and demonstrated enough discipline to complete several years of demanding work.
That signal still matters, and in many professions it matters enormously. What has changed is that it increasingly has competition.
Digital technology has made people’s work visible in ways that previous generations could barely have imagined. Someone applying for a creative job can arrive with years of work already available online, while programmers can point to projects, entrepreneurs can show businesses, researchers can publish ideas and specialists can build reputations through communities that extend far beyond the institutions where they studied. In some industries, an employer may now know more about what an applicant is capable of before interviewing them than employers once discovered during the first several months of employment.
AI is likely to accelerate that shift, but it may also complicate it. If almost anyone can use artificial intelligence to produce a polished piece of writing, attractive presentation, competent piece of code or impressive-looking design, simply presenting finished work may become less convincing than it is today. Employers may increasingly want to understand the judgement behind the work: why certain decisions were made, whether someone can identify errors, whether they genuinely understand the underlying problem and what happens when the AI-generated answer turns out to be wrong.
In other words, as technology makes production easier, genuine understanding may become harder to fake.
That could actually strengthen the value of excellent education while weakening the value of credentials pursued merely for their own sake. A degree that develops deep expertise, judgement and intellectual independence may become more valuable in an AI-rich world; a qualification that largely demonstrates someone’s ability to reproduce information that machines can now generate in seconds may face a much more difficult future.
And that brings the argument back to where it should have been all along. The most important question isn’t whether a person can put a university name on their résumé, nor whether they can proudly say they succeeded without one.
It is what they have actually become capable of doing.
For a long time, the university decision was presented as though the safest thing a young person could do was choose a direction early and commit to it. Decide what you want to become, select the degree that leads there, spend several years qualifying and then enter the profession with the expectation that the investment will continue paying dividends for much of your working life. In a relatively stable employment market, there was a certain logic to that approach, particularly when qualifications opened doors that were otherwise firmly closed.
The difficulty is that committing heavily to one predicted future becomes more dangerous when the future itself is becoming harder to predict. An eighteen-year-old choosing a degree today isn’t simply deciding what interests them now; in many cases, they are making assumptions about which skills employers will value several years from now, which industries will continue expanding and which parts of their chosen profession may be transformed by technologies that are still developing.
That doesn’t mean the sensible response is to avoid commitment altogether. Nobody becomes genuinely good at something by constantly keeping every option open and refusing to go deeply into anything. But there is an important difference between committing to learning and committing prematurely to a single version of your future.
A student interested in marketing, for example, might still choose to study it at university, but there is little reason to wait until graduation before discovering what modern marketing actually looks like. They could build a small online business, manage a social account, experiment with advertising, learn to use emerging AI tools, study analytics and discover firsthand how difficult it is to persuade a real human being to click, subscribe or buy. By graduation, the degree would then sit alongside several years of practical experimentation rather than serving as a substitute for it.
The same principle can apply almost anywhere. Someone studying computer science can build software outside their coursework and learn how AI is changing programming while they are still studying it. An aspiring journalist can publish, interview and develop an audience. A designer can build a portfolio while experimenting with generative tools that are already changing parts of the creative industry. Someone considering entrepreneurship might discover more from attempting to sell a simple product to fifty strangers than from another semester spent discussing hypothetical customers in a classroom.
This is where the traditional argument about university versus no university begins to look increasingly outdated. The most interesting opportunities may exist between those extremes, because technology now allows people to combine formal education with practical experience in ways that were once much harder to achieve.
A young person might study while building something of their own, work for a year before committing to a degree, complete a shorter qualification before deciding whether deeper study is worthwhile, enter an apprenticeship while learning independently, or deliberately expose themselves to several industries before choosing one. They might even begin university, discover that it is exactly where they belong and continue with far greater confidence because the decision has become theirs rather than something they inherited from everyone around them.
There is no universal formula for getting this right, which is precisely why replacing the old rule with a new one would miss the point. Telling every eighteen-year-old to skip university and become an entrepreneur would be just as foolish as telling every eighteen-year-old that success requires a degree. Different people learn differently, different careers demand different credentials and different opportunities appear at different moments.
What has changed is that young people now have something previous generations often had far less of: optionality.
And in a world being reshaped by AI, automation and technologies whose effects we are only beginning to understand, optionality has real value. The ability to learn something new, test a direction without betting everything on it, combine knowledge from different fields and change course when the evidence changes may become one of the most useful career advantages a person can develop.
Perhaps the smartest educational decision, then, isn’t simply the one that prepares you for your first job.
It is the one that leaves you capable of adapting to the jobs that come after it.
There is a simple thought experiment that might help anyone standing at the beginning of this decision. Imagine for a moment that nobody would ever know whether you went to university. There would be no graduation photograph, no degree hanging on the wall, no prestige attached to the institution’s name and no approving answer available when somebody asked what you were studying.
Would you still choose the same course?
For someone who has dreamed of becoming a doctor, engineer, scientist or entering another profession in which deep formal study is essential, the answer may be an immediate yes. For someone fascinated by a subject and eager to spend several years exploring it alongside people who share that fascination, the answer may also be yes, even if the eventual career isn’t yet clear.
But if the answer becomes less certain once the social status of “going to university” is removed, that uncertainty is worth examining.
Perhaps the degree was chosen because everyone in the family has one. Perhaps friends are going and being left behind feels uncomfortable. Perhaps school has spent years preparing students for university while giving far less attention to the alternatives, or perhaps the thought of entering the workforce without knowing exactly what to do feels frightening enough that another few years of structured education seems like the safest place to hide from the decision.
None of those feelings makes someone weak or foolish. At eighteen, very few people genuinely know what they want the rest of their lives to look like, and the expectation that they should is itself another questionable rule. The danger comes when uncertainty is disguised as certainty by choosing an expensive or time-consuming path simply because it is the one everyone recognises.
There is nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t know yet.”
In fact, admitting that may lead to better decisions than pretending otherwise. A year spent working, travelling, experimenting, volunteering, building something or exploring several possible careers isn’t automatically a wasted year simply because it doesn’t produce a certificate at the end. If it helps someone discover what they care about — or equally importantly, what they definitely don’t want to spend forty years doing — it may prove extraordinarily valuable.
The same standard should apply in the opposite direction. Someone who genuinely wants the education university offers shouldn’t be talked out of it by fashionable claims that degrees are obsolete, that everybody should become an entrepreneur or that AI will soon make traditional professions irrelevant. Those are simply new rules masquerading as rebellion against the old ones.
The purpose of questioning an unwritten rule isn't to automatically do the opposite. It is to make the decision consciously.
Perhaps that is the part of the university debate we have been getting wrong. We keep trying to decide whether college is still “worth it,” as though there could be one answer capable of applying equally to the aspiring surgeon, the future software developer, the uncertain eighteen-year-old, the budding entrepreneur and the student who simply loves history enough to want to spend several years studying it properly.
There can’t be.
For generations, university represented one of the clearest routes toward opportunity, and millions of people built extraordinary lives because education opened doors that would otherwise have remained closed. Those achievements shouldn’t be diminished simply because new routes are now appearing. If anything, the expansion of those alternatives should make us appreciate what education was always supposed to provide: not conformity to a particular life plan, but greater freedom to build one.
Steve Jobs’ experience at Reed captures the contradiction beautifully. He dropped out because the prescribed version of college no longer made sense to him, yet he remained there learning, following an interest in calligraphy that appeared to have no practical purpose and could never have been justified by a conventional career plan. Years later, that seemingly irrelevant knowledge helped influence the Macintosh and, through it, the way millions of people experienced typography on personal computers.
The lesson isn’t that Jobs knew better than his professors or that dropping out was the secret to his success. At the time, he didn’t know where the calligraphy class would lead either. What mattered was that he remained curious enough to learn something without requiring an immediate economic justification for it, while also being willing to abandon a path that no longer made sense simply because he had already started down it.
That combination — curiosity without passivity, commitment without rigidity — may become even more important in the world young people are entering now.
Artificial intelligence will change. Industries will change. Some careers that look secure today will become less so, while jobs that barely exist now may become commonplace. The tools used by writers, designers, programmers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, marketers and entrepreneurs will almost certainly look different a decade from now, and nobody writing a university prospectus today can reliably predict all of those changes. Which means education cannot end at graduation.
Whether someone spends four years at university, enters an apprenticeship, starts working immediately or creates a path that combines several of those things, the ability to keep learning may ultimately matter more than the route through which the first lessons arrived.
University can be part of that journey. For many people, it should be.
It simply doesn’t deserve to be chosen automatically.
The old rule told young people to finish school, get the degree and then begin building their lives. A better rule might be not to have a rule at all, but to ask a harder question before committing years of time, money and energy to any path:
What am I trying to build, and is this genuinely the best way to help me build it?
Maybe the answer is university. Maybe it is an apprenticeship, a job, a business, a year spent exploring or some combination nobody has put a neat name around yet.
The answer matters less than the fact that you chose it deliberately.
When the world is changing this quickly, “That's what you're supposed to do” is no longer a good enough reason.
Questioning whether university is still the automatic path is really part of a much bigger question: how many of the decisions we make about our lives are genuinely ours, and how many were handed to us before we ever thought to question them?
The expectations don’t stop when we leave school. They continue through the careers we’re encouraged to pursue, the milestones we’re expected to reach and even the age at which we’re supposed to slow down. If this article has made you question one of those assumptions, these are two good places to continue.
How Much of Your Life Was Chosen for You?
From education and careers to relationships, success and the way an adult life is “supposed” to look, some of our most important decisions are shaped by expectations we barely notice. This article explores where those invisible rules come from — and what can happen when you finally start separating what you genuinely want from what you’ve simply been taught to want.
Who Decided Life Should Wind Down at 65?
We spend the first part of life preparing for work and much of the rest preparing to eventually stop, but the traditional idea of retirement was created for a very different world. With people living longer and healthier lives, perhaps the better question isn’t when you should retire, but what you want the next part of your life to become.
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