Have you ever noticed that the only people who say university isn’t worthwhile are the ones who never went? You know the type. With a smug smile, they’ll lean back and announce, “Oh, I graduated from the University of Life!”
Oh, did you now? Congratulations. I wasn’t aware that life handed out framed certificates. Was there a graduation ceremony? A mortarboard? A dean? Or did you simply wake up one day with a hangover and decide that counted as a degree in resilience?
Don’t get me wrong, life experience is valuable. No number of lectures on The Intersection of Feminism and Postmodernism in Contemporary Fiction will prepare you for your car breaking down in a storm on the way to work. And a demented boss can be every bit as educational as an advanced seminar on Machiavelli. But herein lies the rub. Going to university doesn’t actually cancel out life’s hard knocks. They are not mutually exclusive. You can wrestle with Kant in the library and wrestle with a dodgy washing machine that floods your floor. You can fail a statistics exam and have your business idea fail, all in the same week.
This myth that you must choose between formal education and the “school of hard knocks” is, quite frankly, nonsense. If anything, it’s like suggesting you can only ever learn from either the GPS or the road itself, but never both. And if my handbag is anything to go by, sometimes both are necessary, because apparently, I’m capable of carrying around my inflatable exoskeleton (which is the only thing that keeps me vertical, given the state of my spine) for exactly a week without noticing it was there all along. (Yes, in my handbag. Don’t ask.)
Which brings me neatly to stupidity. Artificial Intelligence is apparently terrifying. I keep reading articles about this. But honestly? AI is nowhere near as frightening as real stupidity. AI has the decency to make sense at least some of the time. Real stupidity, on the other hand, is stubborn, loud, and insists it’s right while driving the wrong way down the freeway. And unlike a failed degree or a mislaid exoskeleton, stupidity can’t be unlearnt.
Here’s the real kicker: the “University of Life” crowd often mistake stubbornness for wisdom. They confuse having survived something with having understood it. Surviving food poisoning doesn’t make you a Michelin-star chef. Writing a poem about a bad breakup doesn’t make you Shakespeare. And losing your wallet three times in a row doesn’t make you a financial advisor.
So yes, life will teach you things. But if you’ve got the chance to combine that with an actual education, why wouldn’t you? One equips you with frameworks, theories and knowledge tested across centuries. The other equips you with bruises, lost keys, and possibly a deep mistrust of dodgy second-hand cars. Both are useful. Together, they’re unbeatable.
The value of going to university, of course, isn’t only in the lectures or the exams. It’s in the discipline of showing up and sticking with something long enough to get through the tough bits. A degree isn’t just a certificate that says you memorised a few theories. It’s a sign that you learned how to research, how to argue and how to back up an opinion with evidence rather than volume. It’s proof that you can read something more demanding than a motivational quote on Instagram and actually make sense of it.
Then there’s the social education. You’re thrown together with people from backgrounds you might never otherwise encounter. You learn to live in close quarters, to negotiate whose turn it is to clean the fridge, and to have your ideas challenged (and sometimes demolished) in seminars and possibly in your 300-page thesis. You make mistakes in a relatively safe environment, where the consequences are usually limited to a bad mark or an awkward group project, not bankruptcy or a court date.
And let’s not ignore the doors it opens. A degree doesn’t guarantee success, but it changes the kinds of conversations you’re invited into. It gives you entry into networks, careers, and opportunities that the University of Life (wonderful as it is at teaching patience when your Uber driver takes the scenic route) simply cannot provide.
The moral of the story? If you find yourself loudly declaring that you don’t need a university degree because you’ve graduated from the University of Life, take a deep breath. Because here’s the truth: going to university doesn’t shield you from leaky pipes, failed relationships, or bosses who think it’s a great idea for you to coach a sport you’ve never played. You’ll still get your share of bruises, heartbreaks and flat tyres. The difference is that you’ll also have the intellectual tools to make sense of them, and the ability to connect your experience to a wider body of knowledge, and, hopefully, the ability to avoid repeating the same mistake three times in a row. The School of Hard Knocks will find you whether you like it or not. The real privilege is being able to face it with a degree in one hand, a toolkit of resilience in the other, and hopefully without losing your inflatable exoskeleton in case life knocks you down.
As an addendum to this post, I don’t believe that university is the only valid path. I just get frustrated by people who dismiss it outright without any personal experience, or assume that university attendance negates life experience.