What Degree Should You Get If You Feel Behind After Messing Up Your Early 20s? Guidance Counselor Advice
Last Tuesday, I was shoving my lesson plans into my tote bag halfway out the door, when Mia knocked on my office window. The fluorescent lights in the guidance wing were already half off, and I’d canceled my last appointment of the day to pick up my own kid from soccer practice. But Mia’s 27, the daughter of a friend of mine, and she’d texted three times that day saying she really needed to talk. I waved her in.
She twisted her faded Target name tag around her index finger the whole time we talked, a half-melted vanilla iced coffee sweating on the desk between us, a crayon drawing of a unicorn taped to the back of her phone. She dropped out of community college at 21, after a DUI and a string of bad choices that left her failing three classes and convinced she’d ruined any shot at a stable life. Since then, she’s bounced between retail jobs and waited tables, had a daughter three years ago, and just got her hours cut last month. Now she wants to go back to school, but she can’t stop asking the one question I get at least once a week from kids and parents alike: What degree do I even get, at this point? Won’t any choice just be a waste?
As a high school guidance counselor who works with a lot of adult learners returning to school after a rough start, I’ve seen this over and over. Parents email me constantly, asking what to tell their 25-, 28-, 30-year-old kids who messed up their early 20s, got sober, dropped out, or just wandered off track, and now want to get a degree to turn things around. Most of the advice online is either for 18-year-olds picking their first degree, or generic “it’s never too late!” fluff that doesn’t answer the actual question.
The first thing I do with anyone in this spot is pull out a blank piece of notebook paper, and have them write down three non-negotiables, before we even look at any program lists. It takes 10 minutes, it’s boring, and it’s more useful than any career personality test I’ve ever used. The first line is the minimum annual income you need to cover your basic expenses (rent, childcare, insurance, debt) two years from now. The second line is the maximum amount of time you can commit to full-time school before you need to be working full-time in your new field. The third line is two or three things you already do regularly that you don’t mind doing 40 hours a week.
Mia wrote down $45,000, two years max, and “dealing with people, organizing stuff.” She’d originally had her eye on a four-year bachelor’s in nursing, because she heard nurses make good money. But when we checked, that four-year degree would require at least two years of prerequisite classes first, meaning she wouldn’t be working full-time as a nurse for four or five years. That was way over her two-year limit, so we crossed it off right away.
A lot of people in this spot make the mistake of chasing the highest possible salary, or the degree they think they “should” have gotten at 22, without accounting for their current life. If you’re already feeling behind, the longer you have to go without a stable paycheck in your new field, the higher the chance you’ll burn out, run out of money, and drop out again. I saw that two years ago with a 29-year-old named Jake, whose mom called me panicking because he’d dropped out of a four-year computer science degree after a year. He’d messed up his early 20s with addiction, got sober at 27, and was convinced he had to get a CS degree to make good money. But he couldn’t keep up with 15 credit hours a semester while working part-time to pay rent and child support, and he quit. He ended up doing an 18-month paid electrician apprenticeship through the local trade school, which counts toward a related associate degree, and now he makes $62,000 a year, which meets all his needs, and he didn’t have to take on $40,000 in student debt to get there.
For parents who are helping their kid work through this, the most useful thing you can do is sit down and help them make that three-item list, and then cross-reference it with the program offerings at your local community college. Most people don’t know that 80% of community colleges in the U.S. offer associate degrees or certification programs that have job placement guarantees, with starting salaries that meet the $40-$55k a year most people need to get stable. You don’t have to be a career expert to do this; just filter out any program that doesn’t check all three boxes before you start overthinking which one is “best.”
For Mia, that meant an associate degree in respiratory therapy, which takes two years, has a 90% job placement rate in our area, and starts at $52,000 a year for entry-level roles. It checked all three boxes. If she decides later she wants to go back for a bachelor’s to move up, most of her credits will transfer, so she won’t have wasted time or money.
Mia turned in her application last week, and she starts in the fall. She still has days where she scrolls Instagram and sees people she graduated high school with buying houses and getting promotions, and she feels like she’s five years behind. She worries she’ll mess up again, that she’ll struggle with classes after being out of school for six years. Nothing is guaranteed. She’s lined up a part-time night shift at Target that gives her daytime for classes, and her mom is helping with childcare a couple days a week. It’s not a perfect reset, and it’s not the life she thought she’d have at 27. But it’s a choice that fits where she is right now, not where she thought she’d be.
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