Going Back to University as a Sensible Adult: A Calm, Rational Decision Made for Entirely Unhinged Reasons

There comes a point in a technical career when you realise two things at once. First, that you no longer need a degree to do your job. Second, that the world is quietly punishing you for not having one anyway.

You already earn enough money that food choices are no longer dictated by the price of instant noodles. Your biggest professional challenges are no longer “how do I do this?” but “why is this still like this?” You read documentation recreationally. You occasionally do mathematics not because you have to, but because you find it reassuring, a sort of intellectual crossword puzzle that proves your brain hasn’t yet turned entirely to soup.

In other words, you are not the target market for higher education. And yet, here you are, contemplating enrolling in a distance-learning STEM degree. Not out of desperation. Not out of career panic. But because, when you run the numbers, it starts to look annoyingly sensible.

The Problem With Being Outside the Ivory Tower

The modern university is many things, but above all it is a gatekeeper. Not to intelligence, that would be far too honest, but to access. Access to journals. Access to tools. Access to the accumulated output of decades of publicly funded research, now helpfully wrapped in private licensing agreements.

If you are not affiliated with a university, you may still access this knowledge. You are simply required to pay for it as if you were buying artisanal cheese at a farmers’ market. Thirty pounds for a single paper. Forty-five for another. One assumes the authors receive a small thank-you note and perhaps a biscuit. This arrangement is tolerable until you actually start using academic literature for real work. Then it becomes a financial nuisance, followed by a philosophical irritation, followed by the quiet acceptance that you will either pay up or waste several hours hunting for a preprint that may or may not exist.

Inside the university, none of this is your problem. The institution has already paid an enormous sum on your behalf. You are simply allowed to read things, like it’s the 21st century and knowledge is a public good. This alone should make any rational adult pause.

The Curious Case of the £1,800 Module

Let us consider a restrained, almost timid form of enrolment. One module per year. Distance learning. No campus. No fresher’s week. No being addressed as “guys” by someone who has just discovered teaching.

You pay roughly £1,800 annually. In return, you receive student status. A university email address. Library access. Software licenses. A quiet, unspoken nod that you are, for administrative purposes, part of the system.

You are not committing to a dramatic reinvention of your life. You are not “going back to uni”. You are leasing a small corner of the academic infrastructure. This is where the calculation begins to feel faintly subversive.

Academic Papers: The Least Fun Subscription Service

Academic publishing is a marvel of modern capitalism. The public funds the research. Academics write the papers. Peer reviewers volunteer their time. Then publishers sell the results back to the public at prices that suggest the PDFs are hand-illuminated.

If you enjoy torturing yourself with advanced calculus, probability theory, or obscure corners of applied physics, you already know this pain. You find a promising reference. You click the link. You are informed that enlightenment costs £39.95 plus VAT.

As a student, this friction vanishes. Journals open. Archives unfold. Entire databases appear. You gain access not just to the one paper you were looking for, but to several others you didn’t know you needed and one you will read out of spite.

If you read even a modest number of papers per year, say, one per week, the avoided cost rapidly approaches, and then exceeds, the price of tuition. This is not an exaggeration. It is arithmetic. The truly irritating part is how quickly this becomes normal. After a few months, paying per paper feels barbaric, like buying individual grains of rice.

Software: The Things You Pretended You Didn’t Miss

Then there is software. Professional tools have a habit of becoming essential the moment you stop paying for them. You may already be adept at cobbling together open-source alternatives, or at persuading Python to behave like something it is not. This is admirable. It is also time-consuming.

University enrolment unlocks a small arsenal of licensed tools. Proper ones. The kind that are boring because they work. Mathematical environments that do not require creative interpretation. Statistical packages that have been validated by people with stronger opinions than yours. You don’t need these tools. You merely benefit from them. Which is often worse, because it forces you to acknowledge how much effort you were previously expending to avoid paying for them.

At some point, you realise that your annual software savings are not trivial. They are merely disguised as “things you stopped worrying about”.

Discounts, or: Death by a Thousand Minor Savings

Student discounts are, in theory, designed for people whose disposable income is measured in coins found down the back of a sofa. In practice, they apply to many things adults actually buy.

Travel, for example. Gym memberships. Clothes you wear to work. Hardware you justify as “an investment”. Subscriptions you resent but keep anyway. Each individual saving is dull. Together, they form a quiet background hum of reduced expense.

No one should enrol in university for the discounts. But if you already travel by train and already pay for these things, the fact that the price simply drops is noticeable. It is, once again, irritating how well this works.

Intellectual Masochism as Preventative Medicine

Of course, there is also the matter of the studying itself. This is where things become genuinely enjoyable, in a very specific way. Distance-learning STEM modules are not gentle. They do not care about your self-esteem. They assume you are an adult who can read, think, and manage your time without supervision. They will cheerfully present you with material that has no immediate practical application and expect you to derive satisfaction from understanding it.

For someone worried about cognitive decline, or merely bored of competence, this is a feature, not a bug. Wrestling with abstract concepts, proofs, and unfamiliar formalisms is a kind of intellectual resistance training. It does not make you younger, but it slows the rust.

There is something deeply soothing about knowing that your brain can still be made uncomfortable in a controlled environment.

The Degree as a Slowly Accumulating Side Effect

If you continue this arrangement long enough, something curious happens. You accumulate credits. Eventually, these credits form a qualification. Not quickly. Not heroically. But inevitably.

For someone already established, this is not about validation. It is about optionality. Degrees are strange objects. They sit quietly on your CV, gaining usefulness as circumstances change. They do not demand maintenance. They do not expire. They simply exist, waiting to be relevant.

Distance learning allows you to acquire this object without setting your life on fire. Which is, for many adults, the only acceptable mode of self-improvement.

So Why Doesn’t Everyone Do This?

The honest answer is that not everyone would enjoy it. This approach appeals to a very specific temperament. Someone who likes learning for its own sake. Someone who finds mild suffering intellectually cleansing. Someone who reads footnotes.

If you do not read academic material, do not use professional software, and do not enjoy thinking hard about difficult things, this will feel like an elaborate way to waste money. But if you do enjoy those things, and already pay for them indirectly, then enrolling in a distance-learning STEM course begins to resemble a financial optimisation disguised as education.

A Quietly Perverse Conclusion

There is something faintly absurd about enrolling in university not because you need help, but because the economics are in your favour. It feels like cheating, even though it is entirely legitimate.

But perhaps that is simply what happens when education becomes infrastructure. When access, tools, and knowledge are bundled together, the degree stops being the point. It becomes a side effect.

So if you find yourself contemplating a distance-learning course, not out of ambition but out of calculation, you are not alone. You are merely responding rationally to a system that has priced curiosity as a luxury. And if, in the process, you get to spend your evenings proving theorems or re-learning linear algebra just to feel something again, well.

There are worse ways to pass the time.