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My youngest brother graduated from high school last weekend and, against my advice, will be heading to college this fall.

“I think it’s good for the career I want,” he told me.

He wants to study ocean engineering at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), my alma mater. He dreams of a life somewhere along a coastline. And to be fair, ocean engineering is at least a more defensible major than whatever obscure grievance studies programs currently populate college and university course catalogs. But I don’t believe this is a better route than some of the alternatives.

There are plenty of specialized pathways into maritime work that bypass the traditional university model. Maritime academies, trade programs, offshore industry certifications, and apprenticeships all exist. In many cases, maritime academy graduates working in commercial shipping out-earn traditional engineering graduates by a considerable margin.

I also thought that watching his older brother—my other younger brother—struggle to find work, even after earning a chemical engineering degree from Mississippi State, would scare him straight.

It has not.

Part of the reason he is undeterred, I suspect, is that his high school—the same one I graduated from—seems to define success by how efficiently it moves students into higher education. Principals, guidance counselors, and teachers alike treated college not as one option among many, but as the assumed destination of any competent student.

“From my experience,” he told me, “I don’t believe that high school prepared me for the world. It’s always felt like preparation for college. Every teacher says, ‘Some things are not going to fly in college,’ as if every student in the classroom is headed there.”

His K–12 schooling, just like mine, left little room for anything deeper than the next exam. At no point, for example, was he required to read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence in full.

“We only read excerpts,” he told me—and only because he took AP Government. He is disappointed by this.

With all this pressure toward college, I suspect my brother has been led to believe, as I once was, that college is where real education begins—that it will make up for the disappointment of high school. Maybe some part of him even imagines that college is where he will finally encounter the great ideas, arguments, and texts that shaped Western civilization, things he is naturally curious about.

But whatever has left him disappointed with his high school education, I do not think college will remedy it. An education that Allan Bloom might have appreciated is not waiting for him at college, at least not at my alma mater.

USM’s core curriculum emphasizes “World Civilizations” rather than Western civilization. Its 2025-29 STRATEGIC PLAN invokes terms such as “global citizens” and “diversity.” But words such as truth, wisdom, and beauty are absent from its mission statement.

USM does have some scholarly strengths. The Dale Center for the Study of War & Society provides students access to military archives, and the Center for the Study of the Gulf South covers subjects ranging from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. Plus, the political science department has good professors and one Western civilization course, though students are tragically forced to study abroad in Rome. Won’t someone please think of the pasta?

So no, my brother will not be intellectually starved for want of competent professors in these departments if, say, he changes his major or happens to land in the right classrooms while fulfilling the core curriculum. Nor will he encounter the sort of revolutionary radicalism common on many elite campuses.

But even with its strengths, the undertone of USM’s core curriculum is that Western civilization has mostly been one long exercise in exploitation and that educated people are expected to spend their time apologizing for it.

Painful also is that even if he finds himself in upper-level humanities courses, he will likely not be confronting the foundational texts of Western civilization—or any civilization—directly. More often, he will be reading academics’ interpretations of civilization, usually through the framework that the West, capitalism, Christianity, and America are primarily engines of exploitation. The Half Has Never Been Told was just one of many such reading assignments.

And I won’t dive too deep into the English department except to say my brother is about to get the full black feminist literary experience. Bloodchild, a charming little tale about giant alien insects impregnating human males through their chest cavities, was considered essential reading when I was there. Shakespeare? That’s extracurricular, brother.

Of course, I am not discouraging him from attending college because I think my brother is incapable of succeeding there—quite the opposite. But I am discouraging it because a university curriculum and an actual education are not always the same thing, and four years is a long time to mistake one for the other.

Still, I have high hopes for him. He will almost certainly graduate debt-free, which is fortunate since he has chosen a comparatively less lucrative route toward life on the ocean. And much like he did in high school, I am sure he will earn straight As and graduate with a strong GPA, which should help if he later decides to truly waste his time by going to grad school. (I’m kidding).

He is also, I should say, a genuinely curious person who I know will seek knowledge from outside the campus gates. And I do not say that merely because he is my brother, but because when I tested his civics knowledge by asking him to name three Supreme Court cases, he immediately rattled off Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon v. Wainwright, and Engel v. Vitale. He was also able to explain key facts about the Constitution and, unlike many students, actually reads his Bible.

“How many senators are in the U.S. Senate?” I also asked him. For that question, he needed “a hot minute,” but eventually answered 100.

He will be fine.

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