This is a question that has always been very important to me. The other day I was discussing this topic with a friend, so I decided to write an article to tidy up my ideas.
During high school, and probably even before, I had an idealised image of the University. I imagined a microworld, like a village, where I could finally find a sense of belonging and become the person I was meant to become, studying the perfect subject for my future. I imagined a place lost in the countryside where I could find a new group of friends, the friends I thought would stay for the rest of my life. I pictured an older version of myself, more self-confident and stable and I imagined a place where I could have a lot of determining experiences for my sentimental and sexual life.
I guess this is what many people have actually experienced, but my story was a bit different from that, and not only mine, I imagine.
I probably had this idealised image because I watched too many films and read to many books. And especially in the Anglophone culture, I feel they have a special narrative of what going to university means, maybe because they all move somewhere else and finally experience adult life. In Italy, it’s very different because a high percentage of people still live with their parents and attend a university not too far away from their hometown, if not in the same city. So in most cases (or at least, the ones I saw), university in Italy is not such a big life revolution. It’s more an extension of high school life and teenage years.
I remember the last couple of years of school, where going to university seemed the most important decision you would make in life, a decision you couldn’t take lightly and that would impact forever the rest of your life. The best students had to choose something like medicine, economics, or engineering while the rest simply had to find out their path and pick the right faculty for them.
I had always assumed that I would go to university eventually because even if in the last couple of years my school results had sunk, I still pictured myself as a smart person. And smart people were assumed to go to university if they didn’t want to “waste their future”.
The truth was that at the time that I had to choose university, I was emotionally exhausted, as I’ve written in another article about teaching and education in general. So I ended up not going for three years and decided to work and travel, and I have to say that, overall, I really enjoyed my first adult years. I felt completely free and independent. During that period, I had several impactful experiences that deeply influenced who I am right now.
But still, three years later, I kind of felt that I had to get it together and go back to school. Almost all my friends and acquaintances were studying, even those who hadn’t enjoyed school that much. And I knew my parents were disappointed in me for wasting my potential. And so I applied to university and chose languages and literature, because, even if I didn’t like studying that much, I knew I wanted to be a teacher in the future and I knew that it would be easier to study something I enjoyed.
My experience of university was definitely very different from the one I had dreamed about: I was three years older than everybody else, and since almost everyone still lived with their family I never felt that people were particularly trying to build a community or anything like that. Even if I found a couple of people I liked and spent time with, now we talk only once in a while. A year later, I took a certificate to teach Italian to foreigners and after that, I decided to study remotely and leave Milan for good (I was studying there). So, in the following years, the university became a pretty solitary experience for me, something comparable to a remote job, and still today I regret sometimes that I completely missed the social and formative aspect of that. On the other hand, I improved a lot in my discipline and organizational skills, having to do almost everything by myself. When COVID happened, I already had my system to prepare exams without going to class and had created a pretty good network of students who would send me the recordings of the courses I needed and to whom, in exchange, I would send my notes or help to prepare an exam. In the same period I started working as an online teacher, so, when I graduated, I simply went on with the job I already had.
From my personal perspective, I don’t want to say that going to university is something useless, but I’ve always thought -even more after finishing it- that in our society we give it too much importance. First of all, because, if we exclude highly specialised jobs, like doctors or astronauts for instance, I think that you can learn the majority of jobs more through experience than through formal studies and theory. Then, I also think that at such a young age, it’s really hard -if not impossible- to choose the “right” path for you, when in most cases you haven’t experienced life enough to know what you want.
Another question I’ve always had is the following: do we study to become workers or to become humans? I had the privilege to receive a good education and probably I wouldn’t be the person I am right now if I hadn’t learned the things I learned or read the books I read. So I absolutely don’t want to diminish the importance and the luck of receiving a good education or say that people who decided to dedicate their life to studying are wasting their life and they could simply learn everything on YouTube.
But the long years spent in the educational world left me with a bitter aftertaste: the feeling, deep inside, that they told me a lie. The school, organised in the way it is, didn’t really want me to become an independent and complete human being, but just a gear of the machine. A gear that is never good enough to be part of the machine. And so we have endless courses, masters, and postgrads to prove to the world that we’re specialised and good enough. Whenever we face a new life crisis – and we don’t even have to wait for the notorious “middle age crisis” anymore, there’s a new one every couple of years – it seems a good reason to sign up for a new school. As if we always had to prove something through all the certificates that we could get.
Once a person I met told me: “In this world, everyone demands you to become someone. But you don’t have to become it, you are already someone.” She was so right. This sentence really changed my perspective. It’s all very well to be learning new things all the time for goodness sake, but maybe we need to get rid of the angst of being more and more prepared and qualified, of always having to prove on a measurable level the things we know.
The economic aspect then becomes crucial: all these courses and masters have a cost. A big one. And are we sure that we’ll get all this money back by getting paid more after that? In southern European countries I honestly think that the answer is no. But I also have to say that at least here in Italy studying is pretty affordable for almost everyone, because we still have decent public schools. But for the average salary that we can get here (around 1500 euros) is it really fundamental to spend so many years in a university? There are so many other jobs that are paid more or less the same -even more sometimes- and don’t require a degree. In other countries, like the United States, even if they generally have higher salaries after a good university, people go into debt for many years to be able to afford it.
An aspect that is becoming every day more obvious, but sometimes we still don’t want to accept, is that our system is changing and maybe crumbling down very fast and we don’t have the tools yet to understand what it will need and if the university is really the answer.
In light of all this, when it comes to choosing if we want to go to university, I think that the best attitude we can have is asking ourselves why we want to go. To find a good job and become rich? To prove that we are superior to people who didn’t study? To learn something we’re passionate about? The last motivation is the only one that makes sense to me because when we do something that motivates us from the inside, we always figure out a way. Even if it’s not easy, but at least we know that we’ve tried to live authentically, instead of entering the university’s circle of hell as a parking lot for lost souls.
Maybe we should give more importance to the construction of the person and not the worker during our first years, at home and school. Perhaps we should scale back the choice of university for what it is: only a school. Maybe this way more people wouldn’t be so burdened by this choice and would end up finding “The Right Path” – assuming there is one- with less difficulty.
