[legerdemain]

Go back to school for what? In the last few decades, schooling has been one of two things.

The first is certification for high-growth jobs that exist as short-term accidents of history and policy-making. Think of the droves of people doing rote medical billing and coding, mostly as an artifact of the current state of the US healthcare system. Or think of an over-saturated nursing specialization.

The second role of education has been the lowest rung on the ladder to join a prestige profession, like medicine or architecture. It takes a significant chunk of your lifetime, and there are ingrained cultural expectations around the age at which you do it and what your future prospects look like.

A lot of people who fantasize about a midlife pivot have no personal history with any other profession, and mostly seem to aim for occupations that are easy to describe and get saturated easily.