For many adults, the idea of returning to school feels more like a fantasy than a plan. Life, jobs, children, bills, exhaustion, has a way of crowding out the possibility. Years pass. The diploma that slipped away at 18 starts to feel like a door that closed for good.
Vivian Dicent knows that feeling well. And she decided, finally, to stop accepting it. When Vivian enrolled in La Casa de Don Pedro’s (LCDP) GED program, she came with a goal and a fear in equal measure. She wanted to finish what life had interrupted. But years away from a classroom had worn down her confidence, and she wasn’t sure she still had what it took. What she found at La Casa surprised her.
“Returning to school as an adult requires courage, discipline, and support,” she shared. “La Casa is not only preparing me to pass an exam but also helping me regain confidence in myself.”
People ask, “Why does a GED matter?” The answer is that a GED changes the trajectory of any adult seeking a better life, and it changes more than you might think. A GED (General Educational Development credential) is the recognized equivalent of a high school diploma. For the nearly 30 million adults in the United States who don’t have one, the absence of a diploma quietly shapes the entire landscape of opportunity available to them. Adults without a diploma or equivalent earn, on average, $10,000 less per year than those with one. That gap compounds over a lifetime, leading to a fundamentally different standard of living. But the barriers go beyond wages. Without a GED, federal financial aid for college or vocational training is out of reach. Professional licensing in fields such as healthcare, education, construction, and cosmetology is off the table.
Many employers won’t advance a candidate beyond the first screen. The credential isn’t just a piece of paper; it’s a key. For parents, the ripple effect extends to their children. Research consistently shows that children who watch a parent earn an educational credential are significantly more likely to complete their own education. When one generation finds a way forward, the next generation often starts closer to the door. In a community like Newark, where nearly one in five adults over 25 lacks a high school diploma and structural barriers have long limited access to quality education, programs like this do more than teach; they repair what should never have been broken in the first place. What sets LCDP’s approach apart is that it doesn’t treat adult learners as students who simply need to catch up on content. Instead, it treats them as whole people navigating real lives with jobs, families, financial stress, and histories that don’t disappear when they sit at a desk. Staff and case managers help address practical obstacles, such as childcare, transportation, and housing instability, that so often cause adult learners to drop out before they finish. Perhaps most critically, the environment is one in which adults feel respected, not remediated.
For Vivian, that environment made all the difference. Her academic skills returned. But something else returned, too, a belief in herself that had grown quieter over the years and was now growing louder. “I am living proof of the real and transformative impact these programs have,” Vivian said. She is now preparing for her GED exam. She has started talking about what comes next, perhaps a healthcare certification or community college. Her children have watched her study. They have watched her stay up late, wake up early, and walk out the door on class days with her head a little higher.
