Graduating at 79 — with her daughters cheering her on

When Rosie Rines graduated from Boston’s Roslindale High School in 1964, college didn’t seem like an option. But later this month, at 79 years old, she’ll don a cap and gown and receive her undergraduate degree from Harvard Extension School — with her daughters cheering her on.

“At that time, you either got married and had children or you had a job,” Rines said. “But if you had a job, you still lived at home. I didn’t know I could just say, ‘I’m 18, I’m going to do what I want.’”

Rines is proof that it’s never too late to pursue an education. She married young, moving cross-country to California with her 3-year-old twin daughters. Throughout her 20s and early 30s as a single mother, Rines balanced making ends meet through court transcription work and secretarial jobs while carting her kids to school and field trips and practices and recitals.

She returned to the East Coast when the girls were 7 and a little more independent. It was then that Rines started the long road to becoming a college graduate. At 36, she started taking classes at the local Quincy College. But still juggling full-time work, she stopped at her associate degree.

After another long hiatus, she restarted her studies in 2013, this time at Harvard Extension School. Then life got in the way again. Two years later, following the death of her mother, for whom she had been the primary caretaker, Rines was tired.

“By then so much was going on with school and my mother and family, I needed a break,” she said. “As much as I knew I wanted to finish, it had to come to me.”

In 2022, something shifted. She can’t put her finger on exactly what, but something compelled Rines to return to the Extension School, where she finally finished the coursework needed to walk at Commencement this spring. She will receive a Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies.             

Rines’ daughter Karen McCabe, an academic adviser at the Extension School, remembers wanting her mom to finish, but not wanting to push.

“She’s a very stubborn person. So when she said, ‘I’m not coming back,’ there’s no pushing her until she was ready,” McCabe said. “But then she was ready, and it’s really exciting, because I feel like she got a lot out of her whole education, especially the past few years when she had the time and the mental space to do her reading and to do her papers and to engage with her classmates.”

McCabe said that the accomplishment is especially noteworthy because of how strongly her mom urged her and her sister to seek the educational experience she had missed out on.

“She’s been telling us ‘You will go to college’ since the day we were born,” McCabe said. “We never thought about other options.”

Rines added that her belief in the power of education precedes her own missed opportunities.  

“My mother was a seamstress, and she taught sewing at night at the high school,” she said. “But because she didn’t have a college education, they wouldn’t give her a raise. My mother was so qualified yet was kind of pushed aside. I didn’t want that for my daughters.”

Her return to school, Rines said, has made her daughters proud.

“They love education. They love learning,” she said. “So I think that was a big kick for them to see me going back and talking about different things that maybe I would have never either understood or knew was out there.”

The one thing they might not have gotten a kick from, she joked, was helping her navigate the technology needed for classes.  

“I know I drove them crazy, but that’s OK,” Rines said. “I was so afraid to hit the wrong button, because I’m not used to this. I didn’t grow up with the technology. So that’s where I depended on them.”

And while Extension School students range in age — the average being in their 30s and 40s — most of the students in Rines’ classes were significantly younger than her.

“I always felt like I was the oldest, and at first I wasn’t very sure of myself,” she said. “But I did put myself out there during the discussion posts, and it was very affirming to me when someone would respond and say, ‘Wow, I never thought of it that way,’ or ‘What a great point.’”

Now that she’s done with school, Rines said she’s looking forward to continuing to volunteer and take classes at her local senior center, including a dance class and a writing class. She and her daughters are also planning a cross-country road trip to celebrate.