Every few months, a new headline drops about the death of higher education. A Gallup poll shows public confidence in college at historic lows. A New Yorker essay questions whether parents should even keep funding their kids’ 529 accounts. A recent New York Times piece unpacks why application numbers are up — but enrollment isn’t.
The noise is real. And some of the concerns are legitimate. But if you’re the parent of a high schooler right now, fixating on whether college will survive misses the more important question entirely. The question worth asking isn’t will college become obsolete? It’s: what does your child actually want to learn, and what are all the ways they might get there?
That’s the shift we work toward in college and career exploration at EEC. Emerging Educational Consulting is a Denver college consulting firm working with families across the high school years — from freshman exploration all the way through senior year applications.
What the Data Actually Shows About College
Let’s deal with the headlines first, because the picture is more nuanced than the panic suggests.
Yes, the percentage of Americans who consider college “very important” has dropped sharply — from 74% in 2013 to just 35% in a recent Gallup poll. That’s a significant shift in public sentiment.
But here’s what’s also true: according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, colleges received nearly 54% more applications in fall 2024 than they did a decade prior. As the New York Times recently reported, that surge is largely driven by students applying to more schools — enabled by the Common App and widespread test-optional policies — not by a collapse in demand. Enrollment rose 8% over the same period.
Meanwhile, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that 18.4 million college-educated workers will retire by 2032, far outpacing the 13.8 million new college graduates expected to enter the workforce in that same window. Fields like nursing, engineering, teaching, and accounting face acute shortages.
College is not going away. Credentials still matter enormously in most fields. Structural demand for college-educated workers remains strong — even as the ROI depends heavily on what students study and how much they pay.
So why does everyone feel so anxious?
College and Career Exploration Starts With the Right Question
Here’s the real problem: most families approach college planning as if there’s one road, and the only question is how fast their kid can drive down it.
Get good grades. Build the résumé. Pick a reach, match, and safety. Apply. Get in somewhere. Figure it out later.
David Epstein — author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Range and the newly released Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better — writes about what happens when we over-rely on a single, linear path. The families who fare best aren’t the ones who found the fastest lane. They’re the ones who understood they were on an eight-lane highway and made deliberate choices about which lane fit their kid.
The anxiety parents feel about college isn’t really about whether college will survive. It’s about a nagging sense that they might be investing enormous time, money, and stress into a path their kid hasn’t actually chosen — because no one ever stopped to ask.
That’s the wrong question problem. And the antidote is intentional college and career exploration, starting earlier than most families think.
What College and Career Exploration Actually Looks Like
At EEC, college and career exploration isn’t a one-time conversation about majors. It’s a structured, ongoing process woven into our college consulting work across the high school years. Families throughout Denver and across the country come to EEC specifically because they want more than a school list — they want their student to arrive at senior year knowing who they are and where they’re headed.
Interest and values inventories. We use multiple assessments — not to tell students who they are, but to generate language and starting points. When a student can articulate that they’re drawn to systems thinking, or that they need to work with people to feel motivated, that shapes everything from major selection to school list building.
Building a LinkedIn profile. This isn’t about networking in the traditional sense. It’s about helping students see themselves as professionals-in-formation. A LinkedIn profile forces the question: how would I describe what I’m interested in and what I’ve done? It also opens doors to the next step.
Informational interviews with adults in real careers. We actively encourage students to reach out to adults — parents’ colleagues, family friends, professionals in fields they’re curious about — and ask genuine questions. What does your day actually look like? What did you study? What do you wish you’d known? These conversations do more to clarify a student’s direction than any career quiz.
Reading real job postings. We have students look at actual Indeed listings for roles they think they might want. What skills show up repeatedly? What experience do employers ask for? What’s the salary range? This grounds abstract career ideas in concrete reality and often reshapes a student’s sense of what they need from college.
A Note on Students Who Need More Support
For students with ADHD or executive function challenges, this kind of structured exploration isn’t just useful — it’s essential. Research is clear that students with ADHD benefit enormously from having a mentor to guide them through self-discovery, major exploration, and career planning. Without that structure, the overwhelm of choice can shut the whole conversation down before it starts. At EEC, our Executive Function coaching program exists precisely for this — to give every student, regardless of how their brain works, the scaffolding to do this kind of exploration well. Every student deserves someone in their corner who knows how to ask the right questions and help them hear their own answers.
None of this is about narrowing prematurely. It’s about building a map so that when students are choosing colleges and majors, they’re making those choices from a place of genuine self-knowledge.
How to Have These Conversations With Your Teen
If your instinct is to start by asking your teenager what they want to do with their life, know that this question usually lands like a ceiling dropping. It’s too big, too final, and too pressure-filled.
Better questions:
- What have you done recently that made time disappear?
- Who do you know whose job sounds genuinely interesting to you?
- If you could shadow someone at work for a week, who would you pick?
- What problems in the world actually bother you?
These questions invite curiosity rather than performance. They open the door to college and career exploration without demanding answers your teen doesn’t have yet.
A student who arrives at senior year having done real exploration — who has talked to adults in three or four fields, built a LinkedIn, sat with a few inventories, and looked at what jobs actually require — is in a fundamentally different position than one who hasn’t. Confidence goes up. Essays get better. School lists start to actually fit.
And when the path shifts (and it often does), they have the self-knowledge to navigate the change. If you want to learn more about how we approach this work, read about EEC’s philosophy here.
Frequently Asked Questions About College and Career Exploration
Is college still worth it in 2025 and 2026?
For most students, yes — but with important caveats. Research from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce consistently shows that college graduates earn more over their lifetimes than those without degrees. Return on investment depends significantly on field of study and how much debt students take on. The question isn’t whether to go — it’s how to go intentionally.
What’s the difference between picking a major and doing career exploration?
Picking a major is an administrative decision. Career exploration is the process of understanding your interests, values, and strengths well enough to make that decision from a place of genuine self-knowledge. Students who skip exploration and go straight to major selection often find themselves adrift by sophomore year.
How early should high schoolers start exploring careers?
Freshman and sophomore year is ideal — not to lock anything in, but to start building curiosity and vocabulary around what different careers actually look like. By junior year, students who’ve done early exploration have a significant advantage in essay writing and interview conversations.
What is an informational interview and how does a teenager do one?
An informational interview is a low-stakes conversation with a professional in a field your student is curious about. Students can reach out through LinkedIn, family connections, or their school’s alumni network. A simple message asking for 20 minutes to learn about someone’s career path is usually well-received. Most adults are glad to help.
How does college and career exploration work at EEC?
At EEC, we integrate career exploration into our college consulting process from the beginning — interest inventories, LinkedIn profile development, guidance on informational interviews, and hands-on review of real job postings, all alongside building school lists, crafting essays, and navigating applications. Reach out to start the conversation.
The Bigger Picture
The headlines asking whether college is obsolete are asking the wrong question on behalf of families everywhere. The better one — the one that produces less anxiety and students who show up to college with some sense of why they’re there — is this:
What does my kid care about learning, and what are all the ways we can explore that together?
College and career exploration isn’t a detour from the path to a good college. It is the path. Students who know themselves find schools that fit. Those who understand what careers actually require choose majors with intention. Having real conversations with real professionals produces essays that sound like humans, not applicants.
The eight-lane highway is there. Your job as a parent isn’t to pick the lane for your kid — it’s to help them learn to drive.
Laura Barr founded Emerging Educational Consulting in Denver to help families do exactly this kind of work — with intention, curiosity, and a lot less panic.
