What Degree Should I Get If I Feel Behind After Messing Up My Early 20s? Advice From A Parent
Last Tuesday, I found my 26-year-old son Leo slouched over our kitchen table at 9 p.m., half-eaten General Tso’s chicken congealing next to three open browser tabs. One was for local community college program listings, one was a Reddit thread titled “Am I too old to start over at 26?” and the third was a meme about “failure to launch” adults that he’d minimized but not closed. He looked up, rubbed the stubble on his chin, and asked exactly the question I knew was coming: “I messed up my whole 20s so far. What degree should I even go for now?”
Leo dropped out of a four-year state college after his second year. He’d taken out too much student loans to cover tuition our family couldn’t afford, picked a business major because his high school counselor said it was “versatile,” and spent most of his second year skipping class to work extra shifts at a campus bar to make rent. He flunked three classes, got a DUI on a drive home from a friend’s party, spent six months on probation, and moved back home with us to sort things out. For two years, he worked odd jobs: landscaping, delivery app runs, helping a local contractor build decks. I didn’t push school. Every time I brought it up, he’d shut down, say he was too stupid and too far behind to start over. So I waited, until he came to me.
He ran through the usual list of options first, the same ones everyone on Reddit was recommending. “Comp sci pays six figures right out of school. Or nursing, that’s always secure. Maybe accounting?” I sipped coffee from my chipped ceramic mug, the one he made me in high school art class, and asked him a question I’d been thinking about for a while: “What do you do on a Saturday when you don’t have to work, that doesn’t feel like a chore?” He paused, picked at the soy sauce bottle label on the takeout container, and said he spends most weekends fixing up old motorcycles for friends, draws custom designs for gas tanks that people actually pay him $100-$200 for, and redid our entire back deck last summer without any help from the contractor. “I liked that,” he said. “Didn’t even mind getting up early to work on it.”
That’s the thing I see so many people get wrong when they’re feeling behind. When you’ve wasted a few years, messed up, feel like you’re playing catch up to everyone you graduated high school with, the first instinct is to grab the highest-paying, most “impressive” degree you can find, just to check the box and get back on track. But that’s almost always the wrong move. I have a friend whose daughter is 28, went through the same thing a couple years ago. She dropped out of college at 21, messed around for five years, then decided to get a nursing degree because everyone told her it was stable. She quit after 12 months, because she can’t stand the sight of blood, and lost close to $15,000 in tuition she borrowed to pay for it. That’s the last thing you need when you’re already behind: more debt and another failure to carry around.
I gave Leo three concrete things to do before he committed to anything, things any parent can suggest to their kid in this spot, any adult in this spot can do themselves. First, keep a small notebook in your pocket for a month, and write down every activity that makes you forget to check your phone. No fancy career assessments, no $50 personality tests, just that simple habit. It’ll show you what you actually care about, not what you think you should care about. Second, start at community college, don’t apply to a four-year right away. You don’t have to declare a major immediately, you can take one or two classes a semester while you keep working, and tuition is a quarter of what a four-year costs. If you hate the class, you’re not out that much time or money. Third, don’t sleep on two-year degrees that lead directly to stable jobs, or ask about tuition reimbursement from any company you work for. A lot of local manufacturing and design firms will pay for your bachelor’s once you’re hired full-time, so you don’t have to take on all that debt yourself.
What did Leo end up doing? He went through that notebook exercise, and the things he wrote down most were drawing, building, fixing things that are broken. He signed up for two classes this fall at our local community college: an introductory industrial design class, and a basic drawing course. He’s still working 30 hours a week for the landscaping company, so he’s only part-time. He still leaves his dirty motorcycle gloves on the kitchen counter, still complains that tuition is too expensive, still says some days he feels out of place sitting in class with 18-year-olds who just graduated high school.
We don’t know if this is going to stick. He might get through the first semester and decide he’d rather get an associate’s in construction management and open his own deck building business, and that would be fine. There’s no perfect path here, no perfect degree that will fix all the mistakes of the last few years and get you caught up to some arbitrary timeline everyone made up. Right now, the only thing that matters is that he picked something that builds on what he’s already good at, instead of forcing himself into a box that never fit. That’s more than most people get when they’re starting over at 26, and that’s enough for now.
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