Every June, students all over the country don their caps and gowns for graduation. Whether it’s from high school, college or graduate school, most people could easily count their own graduations on one hand.
But not 71-year-old Michael Nicholson of Kalamazoo, Mich. Nicholson has earned 29 degrees and is now pursuing his 30th.
“I just stayed in school and took menial jobs to pay for the education and just made a point of getting more degrees and eventually I retired so that I could go full-time to school,” Nicholson told ABCNews.com.
“It’s stimulation to go to the class, look at the material that’s required and meet the teacher and students. It makes life interesting for me,” he said. “Otherwise, things would be pretty dull.”
Nicholson has one bachelor’s degree, two associate’s degrees, 22 master’s degrees, three specialist degrees and one doctoral degree.
Most of the degrees are related to education such as educational leadership, library science and school psychology, but other degrees include home economics, health education and law enforcement.
Nicholson is currently working on a master’s degree in criminal justice.
I admire anyone who never gets tired of learning and certainly it's easier to learn in a structured classroom situation. It's true that being in class and having a teacher forces one to push ones self to work faster and to have the discipline to review a topic thoroughly enough so that they can be tested on it.
Still, it seems that all of that education would have been more fulfilling if he had devoted some of his time to teaching others rather than quietly amassing all of that information solely for his own use. His degrees are in education after all. I'm surprised he has a PhD in Education without having been a teacher [apparently]. As his mother taught him, "She [his mother] wanted something better for us than simply working at a factory, so she kept doing the necessary for us to continue."