I want to preface this by saying that this is not for everybody. If you have your heart set on working in medicine, if you want to become an engineer and aid the current climate crisis, if your job requires extreme specialist training, please ignore my advice and go to university. It'll be expensive and time-consuming but it will be worth it.
But if you are 18 years old. Or 19 years old. And you're not sure exactly what you want to do with your life or if you are going to study anything that isn't STEM, I'm here to tell you that you are actively wasting your time and spending money on something which has no practical value.
We are facing a world of complete political, environmental and economic instability. We have not seen this level of instability in over a century and the entire global economic system is changing with it. And it is primarily our generation which will suffer the long-term consequences of what’s happening right now. And I’m sorry - I’m so sorry, I just don’t see the purpose in spending the most valuable years of our lives (the years when we are supposed to truly establish ourselves as adults) going to university to study anything that has no real practical value. You have no idea if what you are going to university for is even going to be in demand in two years. In five years. If you’ve learnt anything at all from this year, it should have been that nothing is guaranteed. You are absolutely not guaranteed a job as you were 15 or 20 years ago when you graduate. If you’re still starting university in 2020 despite everything that’s going on you literally lack the ability to think for yourself, there is no way around it.
This has been the case for a long time - you can simply look at Millennials and see to what extent a university degree has been fundamentally useless (underemployment has been an issue for a long time, 58% of graduates worked in non-graduate jobs in 2016) but this is increasingly becoming the norm because of the unstable economic climate.
Travelling is unsafe right now but I would still strongly recommend people on the fence to take a year or two or three out. To find a job, to save money, and then go travelling the world in 2021 when things calm down. Gain actual, practical understanding of the aftermaths of this crisis on real people, find your true purpose and learn what you love and want to do when you’re young. I’ve been around half the continent and I cannot tell you how many times adults have told me they wished they did what I did when they were young. How they’re too tied down with a job they don’t love now and kids and how they had the “same uni experience” as everyone else which basically just consists of becoming independent and drunk at the same time - which, by the way, you can literally do anywhere in the world. Go volunteering to help build up the impact of the Coronavirus crisis in developing countries. Find what you truly love instead of wasting precious time in a classroom studying a humanities subject and if you’re that passionate about your subject then buy books. Teach yourself. The Internet is full of subject information about whatever it is you want to learn.
Just find your own individual passion and then pursue it.