Higher education in 2026: it ain't great!
When I decided to… lol, essentially pay out of pocket to go to college for a second time in my 40s, I knew it was going to be a brutal, miserable road. The few people in my life (who did this themselves) told me so. One person just gave me a hug out of sheer pity. "There will be a lot of tears," was one phrase from another friend that sticks in my head. They were correct!
Right now, I spend the vast majority of my waking minutes working or studying. In case you don't know me super well, I'll run down the cool stats, which sound, honestly, fake. Who the fuck would do this?
I work full time, plus I have a part time teaching job (that I love, to be clear!), a very part time thing working on a game (an unfunded, unannounced indie, just like 99% of my friends in the wonderful, definitely-not-on-fire game industry!), a part time job volunteering on an ambulance (I'm hitting ten years of service in May 2026!) and I also take multiple science classes, almost always a lab science (so, a full lecture section and full lab section) plus another lecture on top of that. Call it 2.5 science classes at once, upper level biology and chemistry (with a bit of math thrown in for flavor).
I also do have a family, a partner, pets, and the usual middle class human responsibilities. There are parts of all of this that are wonderful, but it is all far much too much, and my average mood ranges from "frazzled but functioning" to "gee, I sure wish I could sleep for about three months straight" to much, darker and sadder things that I won't post publicly.
Sloshing around in the background of my brain, I've got (actual, diagnosed) obsessive compulsive disorder, panic/general anxiety disorder, and major depression. I'm also (somehow) continuing to train in my sport, though I am absolutely not competing anytime soon, given all the chaos of my schedule. Maybe you could say I'm playing with a full deck!
Also, here's an acknowledgment: nothing is good for ANYONE in 2026 (if you are not a billionaire or a white nationalist). So I do take it all with a grain of salt (we are all suffering) and I very much want to be the kind of person who helps others, in many contexts in life, and does not cause further pain.
I have always loved being busy, especially when my activities are fulfilling and energizing. Once upon a time in my life, they mostly were, and I was just the luckiest little Brooklyn queer running around the borough! But things have changed, and here we are, and I am making the best I can of the situation.
Regarding my schooling, I expected it to be pretty brutal. What I did not expect was for nearly every single class I take to be a hot, hot mess. I can count on one hand the number of times I recall test questions having only obviously false answers (from back in college or grad school, this would be 2002-2006 and 2006-2009 for me). Or the times a question on the test was never in any material in the class—not in any lecture, not in the textbook, nowhere. This happens on a DAILY basis in some of the classes I'm taking.
Even the very best and most organized classes I've been in have had this at least a few times. Questions that are either so typo-ed to hell you genuinely can't make sense of what it's asking, or where absolutely no answer makes any logical sense, or where the correct answer appears twice… but lol, only one of those instances is counted "correctly" by whatever grading software they use.
My partner and I have a joke about whether the answer to something is "nucleotides" or "nucleotides." Surely, it's "nucleotides" but which one? Answer A or B? Who could fucking say!
I recently studied my entire butt off for a quiz that I was told would be on, and I quote, "the endocrine system and blood vessels." I confirmed with my professor before leaving class that those were the main subjects of the quiz. I studied, I got to the quiz, and yes, the endocrine system was on there. You know what else was? The digestive system! (We have not gotten to the digestive system yet. It's not even next in the order we are supposedly going in, according to the syllabus). And yet, here we are.
Now, I will give credit where it's due… MOST (not all, but most) of my professors have corrected the most egregious stuff and given points back on tests, etc. But that only happens if a student brings it up to them, and many people (in my experience, most of my fellow students) are too afraid or uncomfortable to do so. I don't blame them, I fucking hate having to do it myself. But it's that or lose points after points after points because… either the test is from some fucking weird source from 40 years ago, or the teacher wrote it with chatGPT or, truly, I don't know what else, dude. I really don't.
Some of my professors treat legitimate questions I have as an awesome joke, one even answered a question I posed (before class and on a resource he purported was a study guide he made for us) with a "I hope you find out before the exam tonight."
Great! And very cool!
Here's the thing: I know how hard it is to be a college teacher. Especially a part time lecturer—I am one. I've been teaching college courses, as a lecturer, since 2009. I teach every quarter. It can be challenging, and I know that it can be annoying and frustrating too! We are all fighting so many things (not least of which is AI, rotting the very neurons out of students' brains like little maggots falling to the ground in piles). It's bad out there, and it's hard.
But, for the love of all that is fucking holy, I wish I could just study some material and be tested on it in a sane, normal way. I just want to succeed and learn and bring this knowledge forward with me. I'm not trying to be sour grapes, I'm doing very well in most of my classes, but it's already so exhausting, I wish there wasn't an extra layer of insanity on top of something that's already hard enough.
I'm doing well enough that some of my professors have told other students to contact me and study with me, so I try to help everyone out. I share my own study materials and tell people how I do things if they do ask. I share all the resources I use personally. I'm just trying to help in a shitty situation.
And just to be clear, I did not go to some great institution of higher learning when I got my bachelor's degree. You might recall, I fully failed out of algebra 2 and physics my junior year of high school, so I went to a "fine" and "ok" four year college for my BA. So, I'm not comparing my current experiences to fucking Brown University or Oxford or something.
I am also currently going to legit, accredited senior colleges for these classes. So take that for whatever that's worth too.
I still love learning about biology and medicine (chemistry can kiss my entire ass, though I've gotten a lot better at it over the last year), I still feel confident that I am learning A LOT. But I wish very much it wasn't this painful in this plainly unnecessary way. I expected (and still expect) every single step to be difficult, but this is just such a mess.
How very appropriate, I guess, for the era we are all living in.














