In 2025, Maine’s Joan Alexander received her college degree at 88, more than six decades after enrolling and 44 years after completing comparable work

Joan Alexander received the Bachelor of Science in Education from the University of Maine in 2025, more than six decades after she first began the program. At 88, she remains likely the oldest recipient of the undergraduate degree in the institution’s 160-year history.Alexander, intending to become a teacher, had entered the University of Maine in the late 1950s and was expected to graduate in 1959. She finished all other degree requirements, but the university's policy against student-teaching while pregnant forced her to leave just before graduation. She had her first child, Bonnie. An alternative route emerged through her youngest daughter, Tracy, who contacted the College of Education and Human Development to ask whether her mother's unfinished degree could be resolved.University found her later preschool work met the missing requirement Justin Dimmel, associate dean for academics and student engagement in the College of Education and Human Development, examined Alexander's academic history with colleagues to determine whether the outstanding requirement could be satisfied by her later experience. The review found that Alexander, in 1980-81, had undertaken work which was comparable to student teaching roughly two decades after her original studies. She had worked full-time at a home-based preschool program in Southwest Harbor, Maine, where she taught preschool-aged children on gross and fine motor skills, verbal communication, imaginative play and early literacy.After the work was reviewed, the college determined that a year of full-time employment with preschool children was akin to the student-teaching requirement she had been unable to complete in the 1950s. That finding made it possible to award Alexander the degree without requiring her to repeat the academic work she had already completed. Dimmel said the process involved administrators from across the university, and Alexander's commitment to complete her undergraduate education served as an inspiration to those involved.Alexander was finally recognized during the University of Maine’s undergraduate commencement ceremony on May 11, 2025. While she couldn't attend the ceremony in person, her daughter Tracy and granddaughter Isabel Beck attended on her behalf. The story had garnered attention from media outlets across the United States and India while the president highlighted Alexander’s story in her commencement remarks.A degree that completed a family milestone The recognition carried significance beyond the academic merit, as Alexander’s parents had not completed college, making higher education particularly important to her. Meanwhile, her husband and four daughters had all earned college degrees, leaving her as the only member of her immediate family without one.For much of the intervening decades, Alexander’s time was devoted to her family, consisting of her husband, Jim, and their four daughters. Jim served in the U.S. Coast Guard which frequently kept him at sea for months at a time, which made Alexander the sole caretaker. Following Jim's retirement, the couple settled in Southwest Harbor where Alexander devoted time to her church and the local library and occasionally helped at the elementary school. Eventually, she and Jim moved to New Hampshire, where they now live with one of their daughters.Alexander had long wanted the work she completed as a student to be recognized rather than left unfinished. “I didn’t realize that it would mean so much to me, but I now feel that a hole in my heart has been healed,” she said to the University of Maine. For her daughter the commencement was significant because she attended the event with her own daughter and saw her mother’s long-unfinished education being formally recognized. After receiving the degree, Alexander offered advice to others pursuing higher education, encouraging them to find something of interest and to pursue it.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.