What Degree Should I Get If I Feel Behind After Messing Up My Early 20s?
Last month, my 28-year-old niece Lila hauled a canvas bag full of college brochures into my kitchen, dragged a chair to the table, and dropped her face into her hands for a full minute. She stirred her oat coffee until it was practically foam, then spread the brochures out between a half-eaten jar of pickles and my kid’s homework folder, the edges crinkled from being stuffed in her work bag. Three years earlier, she’d moved in with me after leaving a toxic relationship, 1.5 years of a 4-year biology degree under her belt, $1,200 in leftover student debt, and a resume that only listed two retail jobs. For the first time since she got her feet under her, she’d asked the question I hear from so many people in her position: “What degree do I even go for now? Everyone my age is done with school already. I’m starting over from nothing.”
I remember when she first started thinking about going back, she got a dozen recommendations from random relatives at Thanksgiving. Nursing, they said. You can make six figures in five years. Computer science, it’s the future. She printed out a syllabus for an intro comp sci class, stared at it for an hour, and started crying. She couldn’t quit her part-time grocery store manager job that paid her rent and car insurance. She’d already burned out once pushing through a degree she didn’t care about just to keep up, and she wasn’t willing to do it again.
I told her to put all the brochures away for a week, and do one simple thing: write down two lists. First, every activity you do in a typical week that doesn’t feel like a punishment. Second, every thing people regularly compliment you on or ask you to do for them. No filtering, no thinking about what sounds impressive. When she came back, her first list had: organize food bank intake every Sunday, rearrange the grocery store back shelf to make it easier to find things, help new cashiers figure out how to handle rude customers. Her second list had: remember regulars’ names, cut down on overstock waste by 20% at work, keep the food bank sign-up line moving even when it’s raining and everyone’s cranky. No one had ever connected that stuff to a degree before — everyone just told her to pick something high-paying that didn’t have anything to do with what she already did well.
The mistake I see most people (and their parents) make when they’re feeling behind is rushing to “catch up” by picking the shiniest, most high-demand degree they’ve heard of, regardless of their current situation. If you’ve got rent to pay and you’ve already had one bad experience with full-time school, piling on a 4-year full-time degree with six figures of debt is just setting you up to drop out again, which makes that feeling of being behind even worse. For parents who are watching their kid go through this, it’s hard to fight the urge to push for speed, but speed doesn’t matter if you can’t finish.
We started with community college first, not a four-year university. Most community colleges have accredited associate degrees that can transfer to a four-year later if you want, cost a third of what a public university costs, and offer almost all classes at night or online for people who work full-time. We ruled out any program that required her to attend class during regular work hours or take on more than $5,000 in total debt for the first two years. Then we matched what she liked doing to a degree: she liked organizing, working with people in the community, and running small projects, so we landed on the Associate of Applied Science in Nonprofit Management at our local community college.
Lila still pushed back at first. “An associate degree at 28? All my high school friends have bachelor’s already. Some have master’s. That’s so embarrassing.” I pulled up the website for the regional food bank she volunteers at, pulled up the staff page, and showed her the executive director’s bio. She got her associate degree at 32, after being a single mom working as a cashier for 10 years, got her bachelor’s part-time at 36, and has been running the food bank for 8 years now. That wasn’t some fancy influencer success story, it was someone doing the exact work Lila already cares about, who took the same slow path.
Last week, she went to her first orientation. She texted me a photo of her student ID, grinning, and said half the people in her intro class are over 25. One guy is 42, used to be a construction worker, and he’s getting the degree to start a nonprofit that connects at-risk kids with apprenticeships. Best of all, the program lets her count her current volunteer work at the food bank and her management experience at the grocery store toward her required internship, so she doesn’t have to add extra unpaid hours to her already full schedule.
Lila still has bad days. Last night, she texted me that she saw an old high school friend post about closing on her first house, and she sat in her car after work for 10 minutes feeling like she’s still way behind. She’s already worried about balancing midterms with the holiday rush at the grocery store, and she hasn’t ruled out switching programs if she finds out she hates nonprofit work. But right now, what’s working is that this isn’t a random degree she picked just to feel like she’s making progress. It’s built on the work she’s already done to get her life back together these last few years. We don’t know how it’ll end up. But for now, that’s enough.
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