My mother-in-law took classes for 40 years. Just one, maybe two, at a time. She never pursued a degree path, at least not to completion. She died at 70, still talking about going back to get her EMT license.
My father got his PhD back in the late 1970s. He worked at a university. He’s been retired for a decade now. But, he’s never stopped going to classes. They’re not for credit. He doesn’t do the class work. But, he goes & listens. I expect him to keep going until he just can’t.
When I was a student in the early 90s, one of my classmates was a charming lady who must have been almost 70. She wasn’t taking a class of two for the semester, she had registered as a regular student because, as she told us, she hadn’t had the opportunity to go to university when she was younger and had always regretted it.
She quickly became popular with all of us as she was very sweet, hard-working and actually quite bright. She passed all her exams and got her degree along with us four years later. The only problem was that her pronunciation of foreign names and titles was atrocious which was a bit of a problem in a literature class. But she took it in her stride and teachers didn’t insist too much on it, especially since her marks were good.
A couple of years ago, I was on a flea market and spotted some books that I had used as a student twenty years earlier. As I browsed through them, the person who was selling them told me that they belonged to an old relative who had passed away a few months before.
I can’t be sure that they were hers but I do know that they were precisely the same late-80s editions that I had, which I haven’t seen anywhere since. And she’d have been almost 90. That made me feel weirdly glad because if they were her, she had a long life and fulfilled her dreams.
I have a friend who is not merely the longest-registered student I know, she’s also been working at getting her Ph.D. longer than anyone I’ve ever heard of. She’s still at it (and says that her goal is to finally graduate this spring). I hesitate to say how long, but it’s been decades since she started.
She isn’t supported by the school or any grants. She’s been supporting herself, and the many setbacks and money problems she’s had are a big reason that it’s taken her so long to obtain this degree.
That is a nice story.
I do take courses not for credit, like French. Also, for this year, my job requires me to get a graduate certificate, so I am taking college classes for credit. I can see myself in the future still taking some classes, either languages or some other forms of certificate that are more related to my skills and job.
I also do have a full-time job, and have had one for almost a decade now, as my graduate training included working full-time in my area as part of it.
Apologies. I got you confused with another poster who is a lady.
IIRC, you are a gentleman.
Sorry.
Just read on Johnny’s wiki page that U of Wisconsin created the “Johnny Lechner rule” whereby they could double the tuition of a student like Johnny. What the heck is the reasoning? “You clearly like the University too much, we don’t want you. This place is for people in their late teens and 20’s - get out.”
It doesn’t look good for a school if students take a long time to graduate. One of the ways colleges are ranked is by their 4-year graduation rates. If Lechner had been a non-degree seeking student then the school probably would have been happy to have him keep taking classes forever. As I mentioned upthread, as a non-degree seeking student it’s also likely he would have been paying less in tuition than a regular undergraduate. But it’s not like UW-Whitewater is a particularly well-known or prestigious school to begin with, and if their name suddenly starts coming up in the media because of a “real life Van Wilder” who’s actually considerably older than the fictional character then it’s going to be harder for them to convince prospective students and their parents that attending UW-Whitewater will be a good investment.
I took classes off and on for about 10 years.
Thing is it kind of becomes a habit and you set your life around the school schedule. It felt odd the first year of no classes.
Yes, yes it does.
When it comes to bathing, no, there isn’t.
Just because you like to not bathe and go around smelling like shit don’t assume that applies to the rest of us males.
When I was working in the glamorous student loan industry, we heard a story about someone who would take two for-credit classes at the junior college every single semester to keep the in-school deferment going. She apparently had a job and could afford the payments; she just didn’t want to pay them and felt it was cheaper to stay in school.
One of my college classmates started in 1970, but had to drop out due to illness. He recovered and started what turned out to be a very successful business. When he retired, he decided to finish what he’d started. Since he was to use the requirements in the 1970-71 academic catalog, the university had to scramble to figure out how to account for the fact that there was no journalism major in 1970, so that some of the required classes in the old catalog were no longer offered; and that technology had moved on, so he had to re-take some classes for which he’d already earned credit. He eventually graduated, got his master’s, and last I heard, was somewhere out west working on a PhD. I want to be him when I grow up. 
This sums up my impression as well, although I am more cynical than Sattua and in many cases, I am leaning more toward a pathology. Another common trait is that many are also caught up in some issue or activity outside of classes, and this seems to suck up a lot of time and energy, and the student doesn’t seem to see that it might possibly be interfering with their academic progress (or probably more that they don’t think about it because they don’t care). I’ve heard students talk about very minor (in the scheme of things) campus activities, and how that work is so important, that understandably (in their eyes), they’ve taken a lighter course schedule that semester, or are taking an incomplete, or something else that is delaying them even more.
One thing that’s been mentioned but not explicitly stated: the vast majority of grad students in the hard sciences are paid to be there. Tuition is covered, and there’s usually a stipend approaching a living wage (for a young single person). Now most grad students work really fucking hard because they’re interested in their research topic and they want to graduate at a reasonable time, or maybe they have a demanding research advisor, or a heavy teaching assistant load. Some, however, can skate by with minimal effort for many years.
I knew a sixth-year master’s student that wasn’t in any hurry to graduate. He was still getting half-time funding from his research advisor, and half-time funding for TAing one or two fairly easy classes per semester. I’d be surprised if he ever worked more than 40 hours in a week. His research advisor was happy to keep him as long as he wanted because he was reasonably competent and there wasn’t enough funding to pay for a full-time researcher. In total for doing ~10 hours a week of showing up to classes and grading tests, and ~20-30 hours per week of bench research, he paid no tuition and received a ~$20k stipend and health insurance. That’s a career dead end, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a full-time retail job…
My old university back when it was smaller, had a well-known example who was simply rich enough to pay tuition. He stayed 15 years or so working on undergraduate degrees, until he got a place on the cricket team (an English game not the same as baseball), played the season, then retired.
In some places, they’re cracking down in those graduate students as well. As the rankings in undergraduates improve, universities may also want to improve them in the graduate degrees. Some of have funding available for up to 3-5 years, and after that is it up to the student to find a fellowship or finish the degree ASAP. They need to keep fresh blood. As well, some of the PhD projects must stay relevant. At the college I got my PhD, a 6 year master’s student would not exist, they’d be pressured to drop out, get into the PhD program, or graduate with whatever they had done as master’s work.
I lived reasonably OK with my graduate stipend, certainly better than I did with my other degrees.
I’m not sure what the big mystery is about. Working a real corporate job sucks. Especially when you compare it to living on or around a college campus full of 20-something year old girls.
A buddy of mine got his BS in biochem with me. He got married, and his wife supported him through his masters. He then applied and was accepted to dental school. Upon graduation he continued in school in order to specialize in maxilofacial surgery.
He never practiced dentistry, instead he applied and was accepted to law school. At this point we all laughed, but his wife continued to move up in her field and she supported them. After graduating law school, he opened a medical malpractice law practice. On the side he worked on and eventually recieved his JD degree.
This. I desperately wanted to be Van Wilder when I was younger (I was in college when it came out). Today, I’m a reasonably successful professional and I’m marrier with a house and stuff, and I still want to be Van Wilder.
I grew up in a college town, my parents were faculty, so let’s take a swing at this one.
I knew plenty of people who took less than a full-time course load so they could work at a job to cover tuition. This meant it took them more than 4 years to graduate. I knew one guy who took 7 years to get his BA. Heck, my father got his BA at 24 in the 1950s because he had to work to pay his way.
Graduate students usually take jobs teaching/assisting to help pay their way. So that guy who seems like he’s been hanging around the physics building for a decade just might be getting his PhD.
Some people have a wealthy benefactor. My stepfather’s father had been an important educator (has a high school named for him), and died before his kids started high school. His friends and colleagues set up a trust fund for the kids: as long as they were enrolled in college, the trust would pay their living expenses.
My step-aunt decided not to go to college, so my stepfather was the only one to take advantage of that trust fund. He was “working on his Masters” for quite a while, finally quitting when he was over 40.
He was attending school because tuition was cheaper than rent, and working less gave him more time to practice playing the violin. He taught in local schools to pay his tuition.
He finally reached a point where he could make a living as a musician so he quit school.
So yeah, it was a pretty good gig being a professional student. But it wasn’t his dream job.
There was a man of legend in my home town, known far and wide as Physics Phil.
Phil was evidently some sort of graduate student in the Physics Department. Phil cared about nothing but physics.
Many had met Phil because they picked him up hitchhiking. Learning to drive would have taken brainspace that could have been used on physics.
Outwardly, Phil was easily mistaken for a vagrant, not only homeless but jobless as well. That was simply because Phil didn’t really care if he or his clothes were clean; Phil cared about nothing but physics.
The point is: Phil was never going to get whatever degree he was supposedly working on. Phil didn’t care about getting the right courses to finish his degree. Phil cared about nothing but physics. I am pretty sure that if a professor fed him and let him sleep on a sofa, that professor would have a lab assistant for life. Phil didn’t care if he was getting paid: Phil cared about nothing but physics.
Phil was never going to fit into society in a normal way. I’m kind of glad that being a perpetual student was an option for him, because it was the only kind of fitting in he was ever going to have.
I may have known the next iteration of Phil: I went to high school with a brilliant guy who took lots of advanced physics and chemistry and math classes (Calculus in 8th grade), and went on to attend that very same university. I said of him that I figured his life would go one of two ways. Either he’d have his PhD by his mid-20’s, or he’d never get his Bachelor’s because he could not care less about the Liberal Arts requirement.
I knew a lot of folks like this as an undergrad. One guy had lived in the same dorm room for eight years and was campaigning to get the building declared a historic landmark. He explained his story to me once. He’d bounced around for a while until finally deciding to get a Bachelor of Science in English–an unwieldy combination in terms of requirements. I suspect that he’d just settled in to the lifestyle, found it comfortable, and found a way to sustain himself through grants, family largess, and what not.
A lot of people I went to graduate school with were very assiduous about NOT finishing their dissertations until they had a job offer. They’d secured ample support through fellowships, assistantships, and so forth, and couldn’t afford to sacrifice that until they KNEW they had a salary to replace it. This led to folks hanging around as students for a good deal longer than they really needed to.