The Degree We Earn Together
When Amy Danzo told a colleague she was applying to a doctoral program, the response came quickly.
"You're crazy."
Amy laughed, but the comment landed because it echoed the conversation she had been having with herself for years.
The timing certainly looked impossible.
She was raising four young children. She had a demanding career in higher education. Her days were already filled with work, family, and responsibilities that left little room for anything else. Every time she considered pursuing a doctorate, another reason appeared to wait.
The kids are too little.
The job is too demanding.
I've been out of school too long.
I don't follow through.
For years, those doubts were louder than the people who believed in her.
Then, while helping her father write her uncle's obituary, something shifted.
Life suddenly felt less predictable.
She realized there would never be a perfect season to begin again. If she waited until life became easier, she might never find the courage to make herself uncomfortable again.
So she attended an information session with one simple promise to herself: if the experience made her feel more stressed than excited, she would walk away.
Instead, she found hope.
She applied, was accepted into a doctoral program in Educational Leadership, and stepped into one of the busiest seasons of her life.
What surprised her most was not how difficult the work became, but how life-giving it felt.
"These courses, the professors, and the fellow students were everything," she recalls. "They gave me life."
Rather than becoming another burden, learning became her form of self-care. It reminded her why she had chosen a career in higher education in the first place.
As her studies deepened, so did her sense of purpose.
Amy became increasingly convinced that higher education should adapt to students—not require students to overcome unnecessary barriers created by institutions. Her growing passion for equity and access eventually led her to focus her dissertation on credit for prior learning, work that aligned directly with her belief that learning happens everywhere.
"Everyone is college material," she says.
That conviction extended beyond the classroom.
While completing her doctorate, Amy became an advocate for paid parental leave, helping lead a years-long effort that ultimately resulted in her institution adopting its first paid parental leave policy. She wasn't simply studying leadership. She was practicing it. Her education and her advocacy became impossible to separate.
Through it all, she discovered that achievement is rarely an individual accomplishment.
Her husband carried extra responsibilities. Her children shared their mother's time with books, research, and late nights. Professors challenged her. Classmates encouraged her. Family members believed in her when she sometimes struggled to believe in herself.
When Amy finally crossed the graduation stage to receive her Doctor of Education, she saw something many graduates overlook.
"My husband, four kids, parents, and in-laws watched with content, as they, too, earned this degree right along with me."
The diploma bore one name.
But it belonged to an entire community.
Today, Amy believes the greatest misconception about growth is that we must wait for life to become manageable before pursuing what matters most. Her experience taught her the opposite. Purpose often reveals itself in the middle of chaos, and community gives us the strength to keep moving when our own confidence begins to fade.
Her story reminds us that no meaningful achievement is ever earned alone. Behind every diploma is a circle of people who carried part of the journey, proving that the most important degrees are often the ones we earn together.
Amy Danza 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.