Ask HN: How did you start higher education after 40?
I want some advice from people over 40 who started their higher education after they reached that age. I'm mostly looking at people who decided to do PhD or Masters post 40. How was your whole journey? What advice do you have to share?
127 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadIt's not just the hours of work to be done, the biggest challenge for me has been the pieces of work that need to be done on specific days at specific times, like one-off lectures, workshops, and so on, where I've had to say to my kids I can't take them places or play with them that day.
If someone's trying to change fields into one that requires a credential (I was recently looking into a pivot into becoming a psychologist or a counselor for someone), it doesn't really make any difference if the material could be learned another way, even if it could be learned better that way.
If you need credentials then somebody needs to care about those credentials which means that you will be someone's employee. You will be stuck on what MJ DeMarco calls the slow lane. Even more so if you get into debt because of it. Howerver, I think big discoveries, money or writing a bestselling book do not care about your credentials. You can achieve higher education and big success on your own.
Lawyers can have their own firms. Doctors can have their own practices. LOTS of psychotherapists have their own practices. There's nothing "slow lane" about it for the ones who do it well.
But if they don't have the requisite credential, they get shut down.
The lion's share of general "entry-level" opportunities for newly-minted technical masters/doctorates will struggle to value whatever experience you had before going to graduate school. This is less true for certain industry-specific positions, which is why identifying those positions before starting is a good idea.
If you're comfortable restarting your career as a junior researcher in your late 40s, be aware of the unusual place you'll occupy in the academic hierarchy.
If you already have a successful career in a non-credential field it’s unlikely getting a vanity credential like a taught Master’s will do much for you, unless it’s a finishing school proof of class habitus like an MBA. A Ph.D. like an MBA is good for changing fields and perhaps social class entirely but it’s unlikely to pay off in monetary terms.
I went through one myself and am currently working on my PhD. If you have a relevant career or just come off as pretty mature a master's program will be happy to have you even if there were issues in your undergrad, but very few institutions worth going to will admit you without a bachelor's of any kind and the circumstances would have to be something truly remarkable.
https://www.london.ac.uk/courses/international_type_of_study...
https://www.london.ac.uk/courses/msc-computer-science#progra...
I have a decade of experience in software development and a smattering of Coursera certificates in relevant areas. Doing a BSc feels like it would be, not a waste exactly but inefficient and overly expensive. But it looks like University of London they offer a PCert->MSc pathway for CS.
Did you do the micro-master because you didn't have (much) relevant experience in the field? How important do you think it was on your application?
I did it so I could show some reason to admit me to the course. Absent any relevant work experience they needed some evidence I could think think and write. They asked for a notarized copy as part of the application process. Legible bureaucratic qualifications are a good thing to have if you’re trying to get another legible bureaucratic qualification.
I think students with experience are great for courses, and applications from these sorts of candidates look great amongst piles of identikit young over achievers.
I've also had three years of not working due to looking after my children while my partner worked. That was incredibly rewarding and incredibly tiring. Now with them in childcare it's a great time for me to go back to university for a masters with the intention of finding a PhD place after that.
For me, the goal is to get more rewarding work. Personally, that means working for what I feel is a better goal that purely making money for a company owner. I plan to take a masters in Software Engineering and then use that skill to transfer to a subject in Earth Science (or similar) where I can use programming to fulfil research needs and hopefully continue in that vein for a rebooted career.
Luckily now I'm living in Norway means that a masters is free and as my partner works I can concentrate on study without needing to worry about money.
Advice from my thinking so far would be: - know what your aim is. Education for it's own sake is great but if you have a different goal in mind then consider whether higher education is the best way to get there. If you know other people in a position you'd like to be in, ask them what the current best route to get there is. - try and discuss with potential course supervisors in advance whether or not you will be accepted. With 20 years out of education, I've found it interesting to consider whether or not my industry skills will be valued as much as the school/university level education. I'm definitely not as sharp on lots of things but that experience does count for lots. - if you're behind on what current "feed in" courses teach fellow masters students, sit in on lectures and read the course material as much as possible so you're not behind when you start. - the academics I know love to talk about academia and are a great source of knowledge on the education routes that are open. Being an older student will probably mean you're better able to approach them and get this knowledge. Everyone I've spoken to has wanted to help so take advantage of this.
Good luck, hope you find the right route for you!
First, since I have a career already, I'm free of the pressure to go to school for career purposes and can focus on something I enjoy, which also provides immense value to what I'm doing every day (I chose philosophy, much more relevant and practical than I think many realize).
Second, I enjoy the experience and get quite a bit more depth from it than I would have in my 20's. It's a richer, more meaningful experience now that I'm older, have a strong sense of who I am, and am not put off in the slightest by naysayers or influenced by people's opinions of what I should or shouldn't be doing. I have more maturity now than at any other time in my life, and this has served me well in the sense of approaching topics with intellectual humility and just enjoying the process of knowing nothing to knowing a little. I do all the reading and then some, reading far and wide as well as doing deep analysis, writing all my notes, reviewing, and doing practice essays, and I enjoy every bit of it rather than seeing it as a chore.
So, some initial thoughts for you, hope they're helpful. The only advice I can give is to enjoy it, realize it's a wonderful opportunity, be structured and disciplined with your time, and use your hard-earned experience to your advantage.
Sure, you can live on the bland essentials, and you cannot live on toppings alone, yet who doesn’t like a little… sauce with that?
She actually brought up this Harvard philosophy professor who had a story about keeping track of parantheses. I took advantage of the opportunity to show her the connections to Curry and from there to Lisp and the Little Schemer. She got it. She can reason, formally. That's important.
Perhaps things would be different for someone in their 40s, who has a wealth of real world experience to draw on, philosophy would be valuable. But for the average 18 year old kid, studying it seems to create a set of terrible habits that take years to undo before the student can become a properly integrated adult.
But that seems to be a broader issue with specialization anyway. Focus on one lane for too long and your brain starts to disfunction in odd ways.
In the time of Plato and Aristotle it was frowned upon to teach philosophy to students below the age of 35 because they wouldn't know what to do with that knowledge.
You know what's relevant and interesting to you and what's not.
As others have already asked, could you expand on this? Very interested.
I started undergrad in my 30s, and also majored philosophy for similar reasons. It really is the most rigorous non-STEM undergrad degree you can get. And for people (like myself) who can’t pass calculus, but are still fairly intelligent, it can easily be parlayed into a more technical graduate program.
I don't think this crowd would get much out of it.
We can't say if any particular approach to life is the best, but we can say that if you change your mind about which approach is best at age 70 you've spent a lot of years setting up for the wrong outcome. It is never to late in theory. But as a practical matter 70 is a bit late to sit down, take a step back, ask why and try to act on it. Better for people to line themselves up with good foundations from their 20s or maybe 30s. It is good to explore the options early, and think a bit about what the word 'option' even means philosophically.
On the other hand, something like:
> Given a one-dimensional invariant subspace, prove that any nonzero vector in that space is an eigenvector and all such eigenvectors have the same eigenvalue.
really forces you to grapple with an entirely different level of abstraction
This world needs more utilitarianism and less categorical imperatives...
Utilitarianism benefits a lot from having a Cliff notes version that sounds less dumb than the Cliff notes versions of other ethical frameworks, but I don't think that is the right way to evaluate ethics. Besides, philosophy class ethics is really more of an exercise in "let's construct a formal framework that matches our intuitions" rather than "let's make normative judgements about stuff in the real world."
Engineers are not models of logical thinking that they assume they are. Illogic is everywhere and it takes constant vigilance to avoid always going with your gut feelings.
Philosophy gives you a set of meta cognitive skills that help everywhere. It teaches you how to think. It shows you what class of problems are soluble, and which are things where we just have to accept tradeoffs. And it’s really focused, in a funny way, on economy: does your argument actually do something? Does this theory offer clarity and bring us closer to truth? If not, well, why are you wasting your breath on it? Philosophy teaches you to see that some avenues are fruitless or just kinda not worth the effort.
Also, non-practically, it shows you the full depth of wonder in the world. Wherever there is capacity for thinking to be done, philosophy says, you can elucidate something important to our human condition.
I also found that I could consistently get As in humanities courses with ~20-40 hours of work per quarter (the time to write 1-3 papers) once I picked up the skill of "writing like an academic", vs my CS courses which continued to be challenging and require a ton of effort to succeed in up until my graduation. My senior year, for example, I had some core-requirement course about theater -- I attended zero classes and did zero readings until I sat down to write the paper, and I got As with compliments from the professor on how well-written my papers were. YMMV.
- Intelligently entertain various perspectives
- Effectively imagine "possible worlds" where positions may be held or refuted
- Formalize language and all of its "fuzzy" characteristics into clear positions
- Hypothesize generalizations and abstractions to map across domains
- Think from first principles and explore their logical conclusions in conceptual and foreign territories
These were my big takeaways from philosophy undergrad and I find them increasingly important in my various technical careers.
I'd rather have open ended assignments. Ones that give moral dilemmas, and challenge their solutions. Make me think about something In a perspective I haven't thought of before. That's a powerful tool.
But that's how academics works, the culture wants tests and assignments with check boxes.
Students starting after 40 is actually fairly normal at the Native American colleges. Our TCU (tribal college or university) has a lot of almost independent work classes to support this. If anyone needs a suggestion to help single mothers, find instructors willing to teach remote / zoom classes starting a 9PM.
In terms of people talking about debt - I went to a decent state school, took one class a semester or much of it and paid as I went - so there was not much financial strain. I work in IT and am in a higher tax bracket after all. On the other side of finance, during interviews I can talk about my college experience if asked about it. Also Leetcode interviews and the like seems to be a test if I remember what I learned in college - dynamic programming, big O notation, how to implement a stack etc. So you pay in terms of time and money but you get paid back in terms of possibly greater opportunities.
Insofar as people talking about learning on your own - as far as I see, most self-taught people tend to have gaps in knowing more theoretical stuff like pushdown automata, or concurrent critical sections, or abstract syntax trees or Goedel numbers or second normal form or that kind of thing. You're supposed to spend at least three times as much time studying as in class, so if a Bachelors is four years, those three years are similar to self-study, minus things like the chance at the chance of questions during and after class and during office hours. So the only difference from self-study is not four years but one year, minus the benefits of classmates, professors and the rigor of a more theoretical curriculum than most self-taught people do, if they even know they should learn about things like the pumping lemma.
I'm in a very similar situation as you and want to jump into grad school, but it looks like that's not possible w/o undergraduate degree.
Prior to the pandemic my partner and I were thinking of taking our family to Italy, I'd begun lining up a remote part-time job, and was looking at doing a masters in Italy at the university of Padua, one of the world's oldest universities, you can study in English and it's cheap.
You already know why that didn't happen.
I decided to start over with an undergraduate degree in biomedicine, because that's what I wanted to do. If you want to go straight to a masters, I wouldn't discount the possibility.
Here are some sites I found useful:
https://www.unipd.it/en/ https://www.unibo.it/en
https://www.mastersportal.com/ https://www.distancelearningportal.com/countries/
During the pandemic local universities that normally have large numbers of foreign students were desperate for new students, fees were lowered on a number of subjects and everything went online , and they got very loose about deadlines - everything was asynchronous, so I was do all my school work after hours and on weekends, and I used leave to take time off for exams - in Australia we have a minimum 4 weeks annual leave. I live outside Melbourne, which had the longest sustained lockdowns anywhere, maybe it's been surpassed now, officially there were ~260 days of lockdowns, things are only really starting to open up again now. I used this time to do the introductory science subjects that normally have long in-person lab sessions. Classes are still only partially back on campus, and will probably remain mostly asynchronous forever. So that's how I have been able to study and work. As to how I made the transition, I applied for jobs, but it's was through word of mouth that I got to speak to the biomed start up I'm now working for. I think it was pretty novel for them to meet someone who had a strong software background, and was interested and contributing to a discussion about physiology so we hit it off and now I'm working with them full-time, and more productive and satisfied with work than I been for, well ever actually.
Context: moving to a new city with my wife and dog for a 1 year masters.
First of all, I absolutely loved it, particularly the course and the study. Getting up every morning with the main goal being learning is magnificent. My main piece of advice is that this is (in my experience) an excellent thing to do.
I've taken a whole new and highly satisfying path with my work since. All in all it's been one of my better life choices.
I was initially worried I'd struggle to keep up with my peers, based on the assumption they'd be more into the academic mindset, brighter and more energetic. Quite the opposite, I was pretty much top of my class.
I found I was able to use a lot of unexpected stuff from my career, and that treating it like a 9 to 5 made it easy to organise my work and get through the material.
You'll find some frustrations. I particularly hated the rigid course structure, and didn't see why I had to put up with modules I found irrelevant to my learning goals. YMMV depending on your course, but it's worth really kicking the tire on the non-optional stuff.
My favourite courses were hands down the optional stuff I was taking from PhD programs and other departments. My core stuff sucked for the most part.
It was also a little tough socially. I had course mates I really liked and respected, but most were in their twenties. I'm a happily married, mostly sober guy. We all had a very different idea of what a good time looks like. Probably different on a PhD program.
The lecturers will be your age or younger. I had a few good nights hanging out with them, but that was rare.
All in all, I wasn't that bothered with the social life because I was far too into the study to notice most of the time, but my wife (who was working remotely) found it hard.
I hope you go for it. It was an amazing experience for me.
I was a lecturer of CS, and the (very rare) older students were the most interesting to interact with.
I did have a 4 decade career as a programmer, but who knows what might have happened if I had taken the time mid-career to do the doctorate.
Generally speaking, the professor's advice from 25 years ago is still solid: don't get a PhD unless you are interested in an academic career, research, teaching etc. Due to the prestige of such a career, it tends to have an oversupply of applicants - the majority of which will not get a commensurate payback for the efforts required by a proper PhD thesis. So they will either flunk / present a low effort thesis, or worse still, they will invest a few years into a good thesis but never develop their career and skills gained into a full academic job.
So getting a PhD for the sake of it might not be a good investment of your time and effort career-wise; If you want to do it for the intelectual challenge on a topic you are very interested in, that's always a suficient motivation.
Google hires people without PHD by truckloads too, if anything they hire more ppl without phds.
To me it smells like a vanity play, unless you’re doing it so you can get another 100k per year.
And yes, I can hear the people saying education is always a good thing to have.
But it reminds me of so many friends who have jobs less than 100k per year in the USA and go to take a masters degree. In almost every case, the higher degree did not change the outcomes they wanted in their life. They ended up with debt in their 40’s.
In almost every case it was a waste of time for the person. Imagine you’re 45 years old and you take 2 years to take this degree. The cost is just not worth it.
The world is moving to a place where degrees are no longer worth what they were in almost every profession (barring medicine, law, etc).
Don’t do it.
The one thing I do agree with there is that education is overpriced in America. As a European, I'd go as far as to say it's exploitative.
That OP is considering suggests the cost, where ever they are, is at least roughly within their means.
I got a PhD in CS around 40. It opened up some job opportunities in software development that greatly improved my career.
Hehe, it’s vanity unless you’re only doing it for money? This is twisted! ;)
> The world is moving to a place where degrees are no longer worth what they were in almost every profession
Do you have any stats or data to back this up? This is a common trope here and elsewhere (ala “Joe the Plumber”), but it seems to be largely not true AFAICT. The St. Louis Fed recently published a paper [1] arguing degree holders are saving less over time. The problem is, it was misleading because savings was measured relative to income (they’re suggesting that someone with $100k salary and $1M in savings is better off that someone with a $200k salary and $1.9M in savings.) And in the paper they demonstrated conclusively that in the US, 4-year degree holders earn on average 2x what non-degree-holders earn. And advanced degree holders (master’s, PhD, doctors, lawyers) earn on average 3x what non-degree holders earn (and 50% more than bachelors). Three times! This data isn’t a statistical sampling, BTW, the Fed has data on all US citizens.
As someone who’s generally in favor of education for education’s sake, I was blown away by how high the income premium of degrees is, I thought the bachelor’s degree might be worth something like 15% extra income, maybe. 2x and 3x averages are simply freaking enormous, and TBH a bit concerning how high they are. It’s hard to justify numbers that large, similar to what’s happened to CEO pay in the US. But with this in mind, it’s easy to see why parents push their kids to university, and why the costs have been going up and up and up.
So based on the Fed’s data, it seems like your summary here could be the opposite of good advice? Shouldn’t people know if having a degree generally enables a different lifestyle? I don’t doubt your friends’ experience; it is possible your anecdotal sampling doesn’t match this data. Averages are averages, and degrees definitely do not guarantee any specific income for any specific person. But the part your argument completely fails to address is the credentialism of advanced degrees - the number of jobs not available to anyone without one. The research teams in large corps for example are generally PhDs, it’s very hard to get in otherwise.
https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
Actually... that report leans very heavily on the Survey of Consumer Finances [0], which is absolutely a sampling (latest iteration was 6500 families out of the 120 million households in the US).
Per page 3 of the report: "We use the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which covers family heads born throughout the twentieth century, to determine whether the economic and financial benefits of obtaining a postsecondary degree have changed over time."
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/aboutscf.htm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21302020
School – in all of its forms – has different rhythms, patterns, and timing than most work Be sure you can work together to rebalance your lives.
After being diagnosed (32) I was told I could have gone to university had it been diagnosed at school. So when I had a secure enough job with enough money to try I did.
My experience of starting this later in life is that you are more focused, patient with yourself, and dedicated. It's been hard working a full time job, with kids, and other commitments but has been worth it for me.
My imposter syndrome has decreased, as my confidence in my abilities has increased.
I will finish it soon but now realise, for me personally, academia is not for me. I like practical useful stuff and with a few exceptions most of these academic courses aren't useful.
[1] https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSmathphys_v5_pr... [2] https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSLA_v2_preview....
The full books are 600pp and 700pp respectively (on small paper format 5.5"x8.5")
EDIT: I'm married and have kids, which add some unavoidable appointment clashes. But I'm able to manage them mostly studying either at 5:00 or after 21:00...
I paid out of pocket and it has financially been worth it. A lot of companies will pay for it, but I wasn't in that position. If a company pays for it they might want you to agree to work for them several years after you finish.
If you don't love learning and being in school, it's going to be a long unenjoyable slog. If you're only doing it for money or vanity, that may not be enough to carry you through the hundreds to thousands of hours of study and homework you will have to do.
You will encounter a lot of naysayers, as you have already seen in this thread. This includes family and friends.
You will also get better advice in a different forum. A sub reddit dedicated to your industry for instance?
If you wouldn’t mind - could you elaborate how it was instrumental in your career and how long it took?
It took about 3 years to complete the degree.
My kids were 5 y/o and 2 y/o when I started.
I'm 52 now and just started a job that has tuition reimbursement. I was (am) all excited about getting another MS but right now not sure. The soonest I would start would be next August, I want to get my feet under me at the new job.
If you have the means and determination I say go for it.
It’s wonderful to have someone listening because of a conscious decision rather than just following the obvious next step. Interact with your professor, ask questions, I’d hope most will try to be supportive, especially when you’re their age or even older. Best of luck to everyone doing this, it’s amazing.
Further on the plus side, it's only ~$6400 for the entire degree and you can take just one course at a time.