Fifteen Years Later, I’m Finally Going to College

What higher education looks like when you’re not 18 anymore.

Welcome to Signals from Earth, essays on culture, life, and the questions that keep us restless. Sometimes sharp, sometimes tender—always searching for meaning in the mess.

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Photo by Ameer Basheer on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I went on a campus tour at Arizona State University. Most of the people there were eighteen-year-olds flanked by their parents—awkwardly holding info packets while their moms asked the tour guide about safety and dining options. I was there with my wife. And that small detail said everything about where I am in life right now.

I’m 33. I’ve lived a few lives already. I built a career in tech without a degree, left it, started over, and now I’m about to become a full-time student. I’m excited. I’m terrified. I’m mourning the version of me who never got this experience when I was younger, and trying to embrace the version of me who gets to have it now.

When I graduated high school, college wasn’t on the table. I was a Jehovah’s Witness, and higher education was discouraged. Not just in a “we can’t afford it” kind of way, but in a deeply ideological, the-world-is-ending-soon way. I genuinely believed there wouldn’t be a future—so why plan for one? So I learned to code, got a job, and tried to survive. My 18-year-old self would’ve thought going to college now is a waste of time. But that same 18-year-old was convinced the end was just around the corner... and that was 15 years ago. If he could see me now—happier, more confident, more curious—I think he might finally start to imagine a future, too.

I haven’t stepped into a classroom yet, but I’ve been on campus. I’ve seen the soft booths in the student union, the little clusters of tables under the trees, the weirdly utopian-feeling walkability of the whole space. It's wild—how much of it is designed just for people to be together. It made me think about the world we could build under socialism. Walkable neighborhoods. Public dining halls. Easy access to quality public transportation. Spaces where people can gather and grow without having to buy a $7 coffee to justify their existence.

I’m not just going to school to "get a better job"—though yes, stability is part of it. I’m going so I can become a history and Spanish teacher. So I can organize. So I can meet people who are hungry for meaning and direction, and help them connect the dots between their personal struggles and the larger systems shaping them. I’m a member of the Revolutionary Communists of America, and Tempe’s campus is one of the most important places we recruit new members. I want to help train and educate some of those young people to carry the torch even further.

It’s scary. The uncertainty doesn’t go away just because you’re older. I don’t know exactly how I’ll afford everything. I don’t know what it will be like to make friends, or show up to class as the “older student” who still gets nervous about being liked. But I believe deeply in the power of education—not just as a job, but as a collective endeavor. As a way of sharpening the mind and preparing for the class battles that lie ahead.

And I’ll fight, to my dying breath, for a world where student debt is nothing more than a relic of capitalism’s cruelty.

So yeah. I showed up to a campus tour with my wife, not my parents. I’m not here to relive my youth. I’m here to build something entirely new.