Rodent at the Roots of the Ivory Tower
By many conventional measures, N.D. Gardner had already built a successful life.
A business idea she developed while trying to balance work and college grew into two thriving businesses with multiple locations. Her success helped fund nonprofit efforts serving at-promise youth. She hired employees, negotiated contracts, managed budgets, and earned professional licenses and certifications.
Later, she spent nearly a decade as a family manager, primary caregiver, and homeschool educator to her stepdaughter while supporting her partner’s education and career.
She had accumulated the kind of knowledge that comes from building businesses, serving a community, raising a family, and navigating life.
But one piece of her own story still felt unfinished.
College.
N.D. had first pursued higher education while working full time. She earned an associate degree and then transferred to Virginia Commonwealth University, but the university experience exposed how difficult higher education could be for someone whose life did not resemble that of a traditional student.
Classes and essential student services were often available when she had to work. Online options were limited. The transition from smaller classrooms to large lecture halls was overwhelming.
She remembers sitting in her car in a campus parking garage and realizing something important: the system assumed she had support and flexibility that simply did not exist in her life.
Eventually, something had to give.
At the same time, the business she had created was growing rapidly and providing financial stability. Continuing to push through a system that did not bend for a working adult became increasingly difficult.
So N.D. stopped out.
It would be easy to describe the years that followed as time away from learning.
They were anything but.
Her businesses became classrooms. Entrepreneurship taught her how to hire and lead people, negotiate contracts, manage money, solve problems, and adapt. Her nonprofit work deepened her commitment to young people and strengthened her belief that language matters. She deliberately uses the term “at-promise youth” rather than “at-risk.”
“I believe language should reflect a person’s potential, not their perceived deficits.”
Then came another chapter of learning.
For nearly a decade, N.D. became the primary caregiver and homeschool educator for her stepdaughter. Once again, her life was filled with responsibilities, growth, and knowledge—even if none of it appeared on a college transcript.
That distinction sits at the heart of N.D.’s story.
Adult learners do not stop learning when they stop attending college. They build businesses. They raise families. They care for others. They lead organizations and communities. They develop expertise through experience.
When they return to higher education, they do not return empty-handed.
N.D.’s path back to education required her to reconsider not only what she still needed to learn, but also the value of everything she had already learned.
Her journey raises an important question for higher education: What happens when institutions see an adult learner’s life experience not as something that happened outside education, but as knowledge worthy of recognition?
N.D. spent years believing that leaving college meant she had left something unfinished.
But the years in between were not an interruption in her education.
They were part of it.
Her story reminds us that a transcript can tell us where someone has studied.
It cannot tell us everything they know.
N.D. Gardner is one of fifty adult learners featured in Beyond the Degree: Stories of Adult Learner Comebacks and What They Teach Us. Read his complete story in his own words, and discover what these remarkable comebacks teach us, in the book from the Center for Academic Innovation.