Through a new state law, I (30M) recently was awarded a belated Associates of General Studies degree… as a bit of context, I was a mineralogy major (~2011 – 2014) and had to leave school in my final year, because the job that was allowing me to afford school promoted me and asked me to start traveling as a SCADA specialist (Google SCADA for a nerdy rabbit-hole, if you want lol).
A few years ago, the company where I was working was acquired and I was laid off, and so I’ve been working in the semiconductor industry since then (cool job, not the issue presently).
Anyway, many of my colleagues/managers have been nagging at me for years to finish my degree; I always got shoulder shrugs when I brought up the money aspect (or the I’m-still-paying-student-loans-for-the-first-go aspect, for that matter). When I mention that I have quite a lot of education, I get the whole, “but the piece of paper” line… until yesterday, when I told everyone the news of my “surprise degree.”
I’ve been told “congratulations,” and “think of all the new opportunities” and etcetera by colleagues, but though everyone means well, it feels a bit hollow, because literally nothing has changed about me or my level of attained education. The only thing that changed was the university’s standards, due to new state law…
Aside from that, the smartest, wisest people in my life do not have much in the way of formal education, and some of the most incurious, incredulous people I’ve encountered have advanced degrees…
Degrees ≠ education!
Tl;dr: Through purely arbitrary means, I got a degree ten years after leaving university and everyone is acting like I just completed the schooling now, even though I have been the same person, academically speaking, for the past ten years. Nobody cared about what I knew or of what I was capable, but now that I have the paper, it’s a “new world.” We live in a gate-keeping professional world where the credentialed convinced us all to conflate a credential/a person’s capability.