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Add to FavoritesHaving been an older student at college, I feel that I got more out of the college education then, than when I first went to college in my teens. During that first college experience at eighteen I was not necessarily interested in the books and labs. The dictates of my professors were not the first things on my "to do" list. I wasn't really ready to buckle down and get into the studying mode. I was fresh out of the loving arms of my parents and their strictures. I went from country mouse to city cat in the blink of an eye and was up to enjoying every unsupervised minute of it as I could.
The college education I got at eighteen and nineteen was about life, love and the pursuit of higher self gratification. This was totally different from the college education I got at thirty. Later in life you know yourself better if not best. You have had a chance to possibly find love and understand better the obstacles that life can throw your way. You have had several jobs and are now looking for a career. The pursuits of a nineteen year old are vastly different from those of a thirty year old. Your mind is now ready to accept the concepts that a college education has to offer.
At eighteen years of age, you don't think about all the things that really go with maintaining an acceptable grade point average and frankly at this tender age you don't care. College for me, as it was and is for a lot of people, an opportunity to experiment, hang out and get fresh with all the things you couldn't do at home. I stayed out as late as my dormitory allowed. I was in the big city and ached to get to know all its haunts. I wanted to know love and all that entailed and I wanted the freedoms that came with being away from my parents' home and their guidelines. Yes, college has many mandates for underage teens, but there are always ways around them and I learned them all.
I had never been away from home for any length of time and therefore was a novice at taking care of myself. Everything that I was doing was new, different and oh, so grown up. I think I was blinded by all the glitz and glamour of being one of a very few girls at this particular engineering school. Males were everywhere you turned and they definitely were interested in the opposite sex. I was not that interested in course work and hadn't really concentrated on any particular area of study enough to really pick out anything of consequence. My major was partying and socializing. Coursework was secondary at best. My one concern about my grades was maintaining an acceptable level to maintain my grants and scholarships; therefore I took what was easiest to get a good grade.
I found that love at an early age. I married and started a family. My husband finished his college education, but I fell into the trap that many a young married couple find. I worked to support us. I gave up my college education until later. After all I wasn't that serious about it in the first place. I had played, danced and had great fun times, but it was at the expense of that higher education.
Completing my college education became an obsession. I was older now and several dead-end jobs later, decided that I needed that piece of paper, that diploma. I decided at the age of twenty-seven to go back to school. Lucky for me I was still within my ten year limit of completing that degree. I could use the course work that I had completed in my teens to now finally get that secondary diploma. I was serious now and wanted that degree on so many different levels. I buckled down and with small children at home, studied hard. I took night courses when offered and tried to maintain a job during the day. I did everything now, when it was so much harder than when it was practically handed to me on a silver platter. I finally understood what it meant to want to learn more and what happens when you don't.
Getting a college education as an older adult is a much harder thing to obtain, but I believe it means so much more than if I had earned it at twenty-one. With age, comes wisdom, be it in life or on a college campus. It brings a lot of insight into most everything and I believe it definitely adds a certain sweetness to finally getting that college degree.
Learn more about this author, Barbara Combs Williams.
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No
Older students get less financial return than do younger students on the same college investment. Employers may have no interest in hiring the older graduate-I earned more before graduating than after. I ought to have got within three credits of completing the coursework then quit. Bill Gates quit in his fourth year and made billions. I have found my college degrees to be labels against which people discriminate. Incidentally both of my colleges changed their name during or after my taking a degree.
Practically, college education today is used to get a better position in the corporate world. It is a kind of trade school for those that don't want to be supervised by dummies. The majority of American college graduates are now women. They have all the inside jobs that pay well. If you are an older man thinking of college you may be better off skipping the years of debt and opportunity cost of not working. People may actually discriminate against you when you get a college degree. My degrees have personally never been worth two cents. I find that just writing without much concern about earning a good living is the only reasonable opportunity remaining. The corporate world seeks youth to sell to, and they are more ignorant and gullible. It is a dominant culture today interested in kicking back profits to it's own-and they choose early who the right people are.
One wastes years pursuing an economically meaningless peace of paper. It is as useless as was reinforcing the western side of the cold war in the military; life was better before the corporate leadership had no communist menace to worry about. Living with the threat of global nuclear war was nothing compared to the peace-era perfidy and unemployment economic structuring of globalists.
As an older student one is already prepared before attending a University. For a decade I read philosophy, history and science while homeless with occasionally work in industry, government, the military or offshore-then came the end of the cold war and a couple of undergraduate degrees and the end of opportunity to prosper in the U.S.A.
A highly motivated older, pre-educated student tends to get good grades in college. At good smaller schools the opportunity to interact with professors and instructors personally asking questions arises and one's education does improve. Yet if one were wise one would never graduate but would become a professional student such as Michner wrote about in 'Caribbean' for nothing awaits after graduation, and time to make the education costs pay for themselves grows short Society is more about bunk and positioning rather than about virtue or good faith.
A society in decline generally gets rid of a lot of job and career fields that might have existed before attending college. It is the will of already well-poistioned people in society to increase their social power and shut off alternative independent routes to success for individuals that makes preferred hiring light upon youth. If one waits until one's peers children are college students to attend college, it will be unlikely that people who have considered you a social inferior will suddenly change their attitude when you take a college degree or two. The same society existed as before, and such people that created a corrupt or deficient society will continue reinforcing tgheir own interests and that of 'the children are the future' interests and hire them instead of you-the older college graduate.
In some future society college graduation may bring objective financial opportunity more closely related to inntellectual ergonomic investment, yet that kind of society is along way off. In the United States social environments may search for opportunities to exclude as well as include. Only in chaos, primeval social disorder and the wild may a college graduate old and excluded have a chance to find direct economic opportunity hacking and cutting through the objective and adversarial world existentially phenomenalized. That sort of situation is long past. It is thhe silk stocking era in the nation's capitol. The poor, educated underclass of college graduates will need to keep their eye upon Christ and the world beyond and theier middle finger toward Harvard.
Learn more about this author, Gary C. Gibson.
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