A Spirit of Excellence
Long before Charletta Thomas earned a college degree, she inherited something even more valuable.
She calls it a spirit of excellence.
Her father had only a second-grade education. Born in the 1920s, he survived the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, worked as a sharecropper and farmer, and approached every task with pride and purpose. Her mother, who completed sixth grade, spent her life caring for others as a nurse, maid, and caregiver during the era of segregation.
Neither had the opportunity to pursue higher education.
Both taught their daughter that how you do something matters just as much as what you do.
"My father passed on something that has guided my entire life—a spirit of excellence."
Growing up in rural Louisiana, Charletta excelled in school and graduated near the top of her class. College opportunities were within reach, but life took a different direction. Marriage, motherhood, and financial responsibility led her into the workforce instead.
She began as a bookkeeper at a local bank, eventually becoming a loan officer. When financial hardship followed the breakdown of her marriage, she took a second job at McDonald's—not because it matched her ambitions, but because her children needed her.
"I remember thinking, I work at a bank, and now I'm serving hamburgers and fries?"
She accepted the job anyway.
Over the next three decades, that decision became the foundation of an extraordinary career. Charletta advanced from shift manager to general manager, area supervisor, and training supervisor, leading people with the same commitment to excellence her parents had modeled years before.
Then came another dream she had postponed: College.
As an adult learner, Charletta earned her bachelor's degree in 2019 and her master's degree in 2022 while continuing to work full time. Education didn't change her values. It expanded her ability to live them.
Today, she serves on the Foundation for South Louisiana Community College, co-owns a home care business serving older adults and veterans, and funds an annual scholarship to help future certified nursing assistants begin their own educational journeys.
For Charletta, success has never been measured by titles or degrees alone.
It is measured by how many lives are stronger because you were part of them.
Looking back across generations, she sees a clear line connecting her father's fields, her mother's caregiving, her own leadership, and the futures of her children and fourteen grandchildren.
The inheritance wasn't money.
It was excellence.
Her story reminds us that education doesn't replace the values we inherit. At its best, it gives us new ways to multiply them for generations to come.
Charletta Thomas is one of fifty adult learners featured in Beyond the Degree: Stories of Adult Learner Comebacks and What They Teach Us. Read her complete story in her own words, and discover what these remarkable comebacks teach us, in the book from the Center for Academic Innovation.