Why go to university?

Life experience

So even if you aren't in love with a specific area of study or with pursuit of a particular career, that doesn't mean you can't gain from university, right? People say it's also the place you can go when you don't know what you want because it will help you straighten everything out. It's a learning experience, an opportunity to grow, and so on. After a couple of years, it will all make sense. Just wait and see.

Okay, all of this is true to some extent. Just because you don't know what you want to do with your life, or what you are really interested in learning, doesn't mean you aren't interested in learning, or that you plan on doing nothing with your life.

Parents, counsellors, and sitcoms have used this reasoning for decades to point bright but otherwise under-motivated students toward university in the hope they'll figure it out on the way to their degrees. We tend to allow there's some logic to this. I'm sure it works, at least some of the time.

If you are at university because it seemed like the best place to figure out your life, that's a reason like any other, but it comes with some serious dangers.

When you are in classes you don't especially care about, and aren't sure why you're taking, you aren't likely to do all that well. How well do you need to do, anyway? That's hard to say if you don't know what you want out of life. If you just want to finish with a degree, you don't need to do very well to manage that. If you want to get into a graduate program later, that's a whole other standard of “doing well.” So you've got a reason to be in university, at least for now, but it might not be enough by the time you are done.

Not flipping burgers

For all those people who can't say what they want in terms of a career, but know for damn sure what they don't want, the undergraduate degree (or in some cases the college diploma) is just a way to get away from that.

It's the basic certification, the foot in the door, the ticket to at least white-collar respectability, assuming you don't screw it up. And for any teenager emerging from high school with no direction in life, continuing schooling seems like a far better option, if it's available, than working at the shop down the street.

This is certainly a reason to be at university even if it's grounded mostly in fear. Let's be honest here. If I ask you why you are in university, and you think more about the things you want to avoid in life than the things you want, or else focus immediately on the things you'd like to buy rather than on how you plan on earning your living, you've got some hard questions to think about.

For better or for worse, it's true that university has become, for many people, the place to gain basic certification. If that's why you decided to attend university, it's an answer at least, and a place to start, but it isn't enough to last. Fear and knowledge of what you don't want can only carry you so far. Will it carry you through the years required to graduate? Will it be enough for you to compete with the students around you who aren't necessarily any smarter or better than you but are more motivated? It's something to consider.

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<img src="http://www.canadianliving.com/upload/CanadianLiving/pool/univc79771.gif" align=left>Excerpted from What's Wrong With University: And How to Make it Work for You Anyway, by Jeff Rybak.  Copyright 2007 by Jeff Rybak. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press.