Should I go back to school?

Going back to school can feel like returning to a place where progress has a timetable and someone can tell you whether you are doing well. That structure may be useful. It may also be part of the attraction, independently of what you would learn.

Ask what you hope the course will make possible. A qualification required for particular work is a different proposition from a period of intellectual exploration. Neither needs a disguise, but their costs deserve different consideration.

Notice whether being a beginner excites you, frightens you, or both. Fear of looking inexperienced need not decide against studying. Nor does the pleasure of imagining graduation tell you how the intervening months will feel.

Look closely at the actual course, its demands and your available resources. Speak to people who completed it. You are choosing a learning arrangement, not proving that your younger self should have made better decisions.

Education can enlarge a life even when it does not immediately improve a career. Still, an institution selling a course should not be allowed to borrow the entire moral prestige of learning to avoid questions about its own usefulness.

Ask whether this particular programme offers what you need: serious teaching, relevant practice, access to a necessary qualification or a community you could not easily find elsewhere. Other forms of study may serve some purposes just as well.

I would add a question to Jing's about resources: whose time becomes available so that yours can be spent studying? Agreements about childcare, income and household work belong in the plan. Enthusiasm is easier to maintain when its practical costs are visible.

Return if the education fits a purpose you can defend without promising a transformed personality. You can become a student again while remaining an adult with the right to evaluate the school.

The university brochure shows someone reading under a tree. This is an ancient academic technique called Not Showing the Timetable. The timetable contains a compulsory seminar at the exact hour every train becomes unreliable.

Before enrolling, request the unphotogenic edition. Show me the assignment nobody likes. Show me the laptop requirements, the group project and the cupboard where graduates keep their doubts. If the course remains attractive, we have something.

Jang permits us to evaluate the school. I would go further and hold a parents' evening for the institution. “Your programme has considerable potential,” we say, “but its claims about employment need more supporting work.”

Then, if you go, enjoy learning something badly at first. There is a wonderful freedom in being allowed a question mark. Do not spend the entire course attempting to look like the brochure. Even the tree probably had professional lighting.