[dahart]

Try talking yourself into it; the question sounds like you’re talking yourself out of it.

You don’t need all the money at once, $80k degree is $20k/year - and only if you do it in 4 years. You are allowed to take longer (and spend less per year). If you’re working while you do the degree, the yearly cost isn’t a very big problem. Find out how online degrees work, don’t use that as a reason to not try. Apply for grants, loans, and scholarships. Some grants and scholarships are need based, and you may be easily able to demonstrate need if you explain your situation. Some grants and scholarships just go to people with interest and promise, and you don’t know if you don’t apply.

Many employers offer tuition assistance, as well as some amount of time for school. If your employer doesn’t, consider looking for one that does. You might have to work there for a year before being eligible.

If you want a CS degree instead, you can easily do that online, and it’s not very expensive, and you can do it on nights and weekends.

If you want to change careers after receiving the degree, you might indeed be back on the bottom of the ladder, but that’s not a good reason to avoid it. Imagine staying at your current job for 30 more years vs doing mechanical engineering - which would you rather? Also your growth may be more limited without a degree. While you might take an income hit temporarily, you can also advance faster and end up making more money later.

I’m pretty sure going back to school while working full time can be quite difficult depending on your ability to sacrifice social life and free time for 4 years. Full disclosure, when I thought seriously about doing a graduate degree after working for 7 years, I opted out. The school even offered a fellowship, but I had 2 kids and a house already and the fellowship didn’t even cover the cost of health insurance for the kids.

[hndecision1234]

I appreciate this. I do indeed talk myself out of it because I keep coming back to the thought of "it's a lot of money, an amount of money that could sustain me if I lost my job for a while". I've dismissed scholarships because I figured I make too much and I'm too old for them, so now I'll give them a closer look.

Do you have anywhere you recommend for a CS degree? I've found it's still the same price as any other degree at the colleges I've looked at.

[dahart]

You could look at WGU for online CS, they’re under $10k/year and they assume you’re working. There’s lots of online information so you can do some research about whether this is really an option that fits you well or not. With work experience in software engineering, you might be able to complete an online degree at somewhere like WGU much faster than 4 years.

I’d say don’t rule out loans either. I no longer know what the landscape is like now, I used subsidized Stafford loans more than 20 years ago. But if you can get a loan with a low interest rate and deferred payback, then you wouldn’t need to worry too much. You might be able to piece the funding together via a combination of loans and work and maybe grants or scholarship if you can find some. If you lost your job or wanted to attend in-person school you could maybe also consider easier, lower-paid part time work. Is family money a potential option? (Don’t answer that, I’m just throwing out something to consider.)

I don’t mean to be glib, I would find the idea of part time work pretty hard to imagine for me, so I have some idea of what I might sound like to you… I just wanted to be encouraging and prompt some creative financial optimism for how you might achieve your goals. Getting a degree won’t guarantee your life or your finances will be better, but statistically it helps, and it is a necessary credential for most of the best jobs, and it is good to broaden your education in non-vocational ways. I’m wishing you good luck!

[canucker2016]

Have you looked at colleges/universities that have co-op education (alternating study for one term, work at a company in relevant field for another term)?

For typical STEM-related work term jobs, the money (after expenses during the work term) is enough to cover most of the costs for the next study term.

If co-op education is not available, then you'd still have earnings from three summer jobs to help offset the cost of going back to school.

[mapmeld]

I have a similar developer-without-college background and did a semester at WGU to see if that would jumpstart things

First, you have to take several general education courses and complete them alongside your technical courses. If you get stuck on an essay or exam you can't skip ahead and finish Python and JavaScript intro courses

Second, CompTIA exams built into the program cover a lot of Windows and IT security group stuff which I never encountered before as a web / software dev. Just like when I was in school, I found it difficult to memorize their definitions of tech terms and take the exam seriously (after all I've been fine without it). The cert exam was monitored by a remote proctor who needed to see my whole room. So I'd recommend going through a certification first and see how that makes you feel.