Written by Torie Robinette
For Joyce Lowenstein (B.A. ’19), a framed bachelor’s degree isn’t just a point of pride. It’s the realization of a dream seven decades in the making.
Photo by Meg Buscema
Joyce Lowenstein (B.A. ’19) never wants to hear the word “math” again.
Soon, she won’t have to.
On May 9, Joyce will join her fellow College of the Arts graduates at Georgia State Stadium for Georgia State’s 104th commencement.
The working world — a juggling act of job, bills, mortgages — awaits.
But Joyce has a bit of leg up on the competition. If all goes as planned and she pursues a role as an art appraiser, it’s a safe bet her more than 40 years’ experience as an art buyer, interior designer and antiques dealer will give her an edge.
Just off the heels of her 93rd birthday, Joyce will be the oldest graduate to cross the stage at the stadium. Seventeen family members, including her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, will be cheering proudly from the stands.
She’s planned a post-celebratory luncheon for the entire brood — an occasion she’s imagined over and over again since withdrawing from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the early 1940s. Three semesters in, she’d left to reunite in New York City with her long-lost love and fiancé, who had been stationed abroad with the Air Force.
Life brought on marriage, children, jobs and busy schedules in the Big Apple. Joyce turned a passion for art into a career. As the years rolled on and the work got bigger and bigger, she became a major player in the city’s arts scene. She harbored one regret.
“I didn’t want to be degreeless,” she said.
Things hardly slowed down when Joyce and her husband, Larry, relocated to Atlanta in the 1970s. Larry took on a public relations position at Kennesaw State University and encouraged Joyce take a second stab at a bachelor’s degree. But she’d adopted a new, all-encompassing role in antiques and interior design. It meant three to four buying trips abroad each year, managing hundreds of pieces in multiple showrooms around Atlanta and keeping abreast of the latest trends in the art world. There just wasn’t time.
The years flew by until 2006, when Larry died. Joyce knew it was time to rethink things, to make time for what she’d set on the backburner. She found Georgia State’s GSU-62 program, which waives tuition for bachelor’s degree-seeking students older than 62, and prepared to re-enter the classroom for the first time in more than seven decades.
“I was a nervous wreck,” Joyce recalled of the night before classes began in 2012.
With a year’s worth of transfer credits from 1943, she took her seat in lecture halls alongside hundreds of students — a far cry from her days at Wisconsin. Her peers were taking five or six classes a semester to her two, and she was in awe. They seemed so young and so confident. Fascinated by their fashion and lingo, she drank them in. And they, her.
Despite some initial intimidation, Joyce embraced the culture shock and learned to roll with the punches. She knew this was her time.
“I quit in 1943, and I wasn’t going to do it again,” she said.
Joyce scaled back her businesses and called on longtime assistant Barbara Domir for help typing her handwritten papers. She got a rolling suitcase to haul her heavy text books around campus, hired math tutors to help her conquer algebra and captured class notes on a tape recorder. She picked up PowerPoint, mastered the art of all-nighters and forced herself to find her voice in class. Her peers and professors were at the ready with help and advice, and before Joyce knew it, she’d become part of the culture.
Despite a few health setbacks over the last year that delayed her graduation date, Joyce has kept the finish line in sight and never looked back.
She’s a force wrapped in a tiny package, all with the classic grace of an Audrey Hepburn. Beneath her deep-set brown eyes, loose silver up-do and petite frame, there’s a pluck and resolve that announces itself as soon as she speaks.
She’s already got her eye on an online certification course in fine art appraisal.
“I’m proud of my age,” she said. “I’m 93, and I made it through seven years to get my degree at Georgia State. I can handle a year online.”