GSC Leadership Earns Top National Award

The Graying of Graduate Studies

Diversity Advocate Opens Doors at Ole Miss

A Message from the Dean

Distinctions

Dateline: Oxford

Alumni Notes

Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been

  More and more older adults are pursuing graduate degrees

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Perhaps they don’t qualify as "old," but a growing number of older adults are learning new tricks as graduate students at Ole Miss, years — or in some cases, decades — after finishing their undergraduate degrees. More and more, students are enrolling in graduate school after the age of thirty-five.

It’s part of a nationwide trend. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of students enrolling in college at all levels from 1990 to 1996 rose just 2 percent for students under the age of 25. During the same period, the number of students over age 25 rose 6 percent.

There are many reasons for the number of adults who choose graduate study relatively late in life, but one of the most common is simply that the marketplace is increasingly demanding graduate education as a minimum requirement for job placement.

Dana McKibben, age 55, is a vocational evaluator at Allied Enterprises in Oxford, a state-run agency that works to rehabilitate workers suffering from various disabilities. Following a nationwide trend in this and similar agencies, the state of Mississippi is requiring vocational evaluators to have at least a master’s degree as a minimum requirement for the job. As a result, many current staff are returning to school to earn graduate degrees.

"This requirement is to ensure that our consumers receive the highest quality service that is available," McKibben says. "They [the agency administrators] feel they can do that only by further educating the people already on staff."

McKibben already has taken 14 hours of graduate work in another state, but he plans to continue his graduate education later this year to become either a certified counselor or a certified vocational evaluator.

Requiring graduate degrees, however, isn’t just limited to counselors and evaluators, McKibben says. Increasingly, agencies such as his are encouraging — and in some cases, requiring — management to earn advanced degrees in business administration, accounting, management, and other fields to better administer their respective organizations. "It’s pretty serious business," he says.

The seriousness of business isn’t lost on Laura Kreissl, a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in accountancy at Ole Miss. Kreissl, who holds a B.S. in animal science and both a B.S. and M.S. in accounting, is working on a dissertation about age discrimination in her field of behavioral accounting.

A former marketing manager for Pfizer Canada, Kreissl decided to return to graduate school after applying for a job with Price Waterhouse in Los Angeles. "They told me that they do not speak to anyone past their 28th birthday," she says. "And that is legal."

Companies cannot discriminate against potential employees after age 40, but up until that point, they can legally use age as a factor in weeding out prospects, Kreissl says. Since she is, as she says, "somewhere past 35" in age, she decided to return to graduate school. Her dissertation will examine the recruitment of accountants nationwide at the ages of 24, 32, and 40 years old. To gather her data, she is mailing questionnaires to would-be accountants throughout the United States. Once she finishes her degree, Kreissl hopes to teach and do research at a university.

The need for advanced graduate degrees is obvious for those who wish to pursue a career in academia, but it is generally not the only reason older adults tend to enroll in graduate school. A personal tragedy was what inspired Carter Hillyer to return to graduate school more than a quarter century after earning his bachelor’s degree.

Hillyer, 51, enrolled at Ole Miss to pursue a Ph.D. in 1998, 22 years after earning a M.A. in English at the University of Central Florida and 27 years after his B.A. at Louisiana State University in 1971.

Between his M.A. in 1976 and enrolling at Ole Miss, Hillyer taught high school in the Cayman Islands and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi; taught English at Phillips Community College; worked as a freelance writer for magazines and a small-town newspaper; and most recently, worked in the guest services department at Grand Casinos, where he wrote the employee newsletter and training materials.

Though he had been considering another degree for years, what ultimately clinched it for him was the tragic death of his teen-age son. Hillyer put off resuming his studies for a year as he battled and recuperated from colon cancer, but in the fall of 1998, he enrolled at Ole Miss and was hired as a graduate instructor in the English Department.

"After having a wake-up call with colon cancer in ’97, I realized that life was too short not to earn a Ph.D.," Hillyer says. He jokes that the cancer treatment, which included surgery to remove part of his colon, was perfect for an English major: "I was a colon; now I’m a semi-colon."

As a graduate instructor, Hillyer is responsible for teaching two sections of English classes each semester, a job he finds gratifying. "I like teaching the students," he says. "I see a lot of potential in them."

As for his own coursework, Hillyer is likewise pleased. "I feel like a kid in a candy store with a dollar in his pocket," he says. "Every major period, genre, author, I’m interested in." He especially has enjoyed a creative writing class taught by Writer-in-Residence Barry Hannah.

Hillyer chose Ole Miss because of its strength in Southern Studies and because of its close ties to author William Faulkner. Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home in Oxford until his death in 1962, is today a museum operated by the University, and each summer the University hosts a weeklong conference on the Nobel Prize-winning author that is considered one of the foremost literary conferences in the world. Hillyer also liked the fact that Ole Miss was in his home state, which allowed him closer access to his aging parents. "This was a better fit for me," he says.

Upon receiving his degree, Hillyer hopes for an academic job, but he is not limiting himself to academia. "If I don’t get a teaching job, I’ll look for something else with editing or writing," he says. His more immediate concern, though, has to do with his older son, Charles, who is also pursuing a graduate degree, in bioresource engineering at Oregon State University.

Says Hillyer: "My goal is to finish my Ph.D. before my son does."