Terri Ramsey Beavers When you’re at school, everyone tells you about how important it is to continue your education as much as possible into your college years. You spend your high school years planning your future (despite still requiring a bathroom pass) and that can often fall flat. The range of students who are 18 and never use their degree is high, and that is because at 18 it’s not easy to know what you want to do with your life. It’s also completely fine if you don’t use that degree – because school is still accessible no matter how old you are.
Right now, more and more adults are returning to education and the best thing about this is that tertiary education settings are getting students with life experience who finally know for sure what they want. College has always been considered as something for teens who are breaking from their youth and turning into adults, but with the help of distance and hybrid learning and the chance to learn part-time, more and more mature aged students are taking up the time to learn. If you are keen to understand why keep reading because we’ve got some of the best reasons below:
- You want a change. Are you ready for a career change? You won’t be alone in that. Some adults spend a decade in the same profession before changing their minds about what they want to do. Let’s face it, we’re conditioned to be born, go to school, go to college, get married, buy a house, have kids, and die – there’s a pattern of society. More and more of us are fighting this pattern and are returning to school later in life because change is a GOOD thing.
- A better income. Some adults are going for a graduate pathway in things like medicine and law because they can see the value of a higher income. They are striving for more in their life and they know that a better income will give them that. Going back to school is the best way to increase your income.
- Breathing life into an existing career. If you want to surpass the ceiling that you’ve reached in your current career, you might want to do more in school to surpass it and go to the next level. Sometimes, that requires a piece of paper to get you there. Going back to school is going to help you to get that joy back into the career you already know and love.
- To finally finish. In high school, some kids don’t want to go to college because they don’t know what they want to do. Why waste money on something they’re unsure of, right? Well, that means that later on, they revisit those college choices and finally finish up their education in a way that makes sense to them.
Adults are going back to school to break the chain of what they were always taught was the ‘best way’, and it’s a joy to watch it happen.