What Degree Should I Get If I Feel Behind After Messing Up My Early 20s: A Teacher’s Perspective
Last week, I met my evening intro psych student Lila for coffee after class. Rain streaked the storefront window, and she stirred an oat milk latte while a crumpled community college transfer brochure peeked out of her canvas tote. Halfway through venting about her closing shift at the downtown coffee shop, she leaned forward and asked the question I hear at least once a month from returning students: “I messed up my whole early 20s. I feel so far behind everyone else. What degree should I even go for?”
Lila dropped out of her first attempt at community college at 21, after a bad breakup left her stuck in depression. She skipped classes, lost her financial aid, and spent the next six years working full-time barista shifts, bouncing between roommates, never managing to save enough or find the nerve to try school again. Now 28, she watches all her old college friends buy houses and get promotions, and she’s convinced she has to pick the fastest, highest-paying degree possible to make up for lost time. She was leaning hard into nursing, because a coworker said nurses make six figures after four years.
I’ve been advising adult returning students at our local community college for 12 years, and this is the most common mistake I see. When you feel behind, you want to rush to fix it, so you pick whatever degree everyone says is in demand, regardless of whether it fits you. That almost never works. I told Lila about Jake, a former student of mine who got clean from opioid addiction at 27, and decided to get a computer science degree because everyone told him it was the ticket to a stable good life. He took out $25k in loans, studied for 18 months, and quit halfway through his second year. He hated sitting alone at a desk debugging code for hours every day. Before his addiction, he’d done side jobs in construction, and he liked problem solving with his hands, talking to clients, managing crews. He switched to an associate degree in construction management, graduated two years later, and now works as a project coordinator for a local home builder. He makes $72k a year, enough for his small house and his golden retriever, and he hasn’t looked back. If he’d stuck with computer science just to catch up fast, he’d be five years in, $50k in debt, and miserable.
What do I tell people to do instead, when they’re starting over and scared of wasting more time? First, don’t start with a list of top-paying degrees you found online. Start with a low-effort two-week interest log. At the end of every day, write down two things you enjoyed doing that day, even tiny work or hobby things, and two things you hated. No overthinking, no filtering. When Lila did this, she realized she wrote down “helped the new barista learn the schedule” and “organized the staff tip pool” three separate weeks, and she wrote down “dealt with angry customers over wrong orders” and “counted inventory alone after close” every single week. That told her she likes organizing systems and helping new people, not handling solo conflict. That’s way more useful than any clickable list of “best degrees for 2024.”
After you have a rough idea of what you like, cross off any degree that requires you to take on more than $30k in debt before you can get a job in the field. If you can work part-time while you study, or get an entry-level role after one or two years, that’s almost always a better bet than a four-year degree that requires full-time study and no income. Most people who feel behind can’t afford to quit working for four years to go to school full time anyway, so forcing that just sets you up to drop out when rent goes up or you get sick. Starting with a two-year associate degree that can transfer to a four-year program later is low risk, low cost, and lets you test the waters before you commit.
Before you lock into a program, find two people who actually work in the field you’re interested in, and ask them for 15 minutes of their time. Ask them two simple questions: what’s the most annoying part of your job that no one talks about online, and what skills do you use every day that you didn’t learn in school? Most people are happy to talk, and you’ll find out things that TikTok career videos won’t tell you. For example, Lila talked to an HR coordinator at a local hospital, and found out she spends half her time scheduling interviews and onboarding new hires, which matched what Lila liked doing, and only about 10% of her time dealing with messy employee conflict. That was enough to convince her it was worth trying, instead of jumping into nursing where she realized she’d hate the long, isolated clinical rotations anyway.
Lila just finished her first semester of her associate degree in business with a human resources focus. She still works 20 hours a week at the coffee shop to pay rent, she still has nights where she scrolls through Instagram and feels bad that her old college friends are further along than she is. She hasn’t decided if she’ll transfer for a bachelor’s degree after she graduates in a year and a half, or just get an entry-level HR job and see how it goes.
There’s no big dramatic happy ending here, no guarantee it’ll all work out perfectly. But what I’ve seen over the years is that the people who succeed after messing up their early 20s aren’t the ones who pick the “perfect” high-paying degree to catch up fast. They’re the ones who start small, pick something that fits what they actually like doing, and don’t force a big rush to make up for lost time. A degree you’ll actually finish and enjoy working in is always better than the “best” degree you’ll quit halfway through because it doesn’t fit you.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Degree Should I Get If I Feel Behind After Messing Up My Early 20s: A Teacher’s Perspective