<prompt> Human: I really fucked up by not finishing school when I was supposed to. I had some mental illness problems in my 20s and a drug problem. It took me a while, but I feel a lot better mentally now than I ever have, but I have classmates my age that are thinking about retirement, and I am worried about how I will be able to get a job that pays me enough to take care of myself and hopefully a family one day.I never graduated college, and my only work background is on and off sales, manual labor, or working in restaurants. My resume is pretty shite tbh. Im a bit tired of the sales gig and getting a bit too old to go back to manual labor, so I have been looking into going back to school. A community college near me offers bachelors degrees for relatively cheap, but I am worried that nobody will want to hire a 40-year old entry-level employee with no experience. I have taken a couple classes at the college, and the quality of the education is really crap compared to even what you can learn on some of the free resources on the Internet. My plan was to get the degree to at least have that on my resume. The degrees they offer arent really in subjects I care much about, but at this point Id rather have at least a job with security that I hate and be able to take care of a family than to be homeless. I hoped the degree would help me get my foot in the door, but I dont know if it will help me get much further. I will be competing with a totally different generation when applying for jobs, and a lot of them seem pretty smart and hungry for work. At the end of the day, I think it will cost me like 5-10k to finish everything. I have enough money saved to finish the degree, but I dont know if it is worth the time and investment.  <response>: Go for it. Unfortunately it looks like a bachelors degree is becoming a hiring factor with many firms even when it is not really needed for a job. From my point of view 5K - 10K is a small investment, so risk reward looks good. I also found it much more difficult to learn on my own, and taking or teaching classes jump starts the process of learning in general for me. Going to college now may open thoughts, generate ideas that will help you in unrelated fields. Often the time we save by not doing something lands up as time wasted doing nothing. At the end of the day though, you have the best knowledge of your finances, your alternate plans, your other options, etc, so there might be circumstances that may not make this degree worth your while. But generally speaking this looks like a good option. 