A student stifles a yawn during a midnight writing class at Bunker Hill Community College outside Boston. Photo by Michele McDonald for The New York Times.

A less-inspired student might have given up, but Winston Chin, 57, wants to be a surgical nurse so badly that he hurries directly from his eight-hour shift as a lab technician to a writing class at Bunker Hill Community College in a Boston suburb.

Here’s the kicker: The class runs from 11:45 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. Chin is one of many older students who are attending courses in the dead of night and the very early hours of the morning because the nation’s community colleges are experiencing enrollment booms, according to Abby Goodnough in The New York Times.

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Mary L. Fifield, president of Bunker Hill, told Goodnough she believes the surge is due to President Obama’s new $12 billion plan to increase the number of community college graduates by 5 million by 2020. “It shines a spotlight on a sector of higher education that by and large has been viewed as the lowest run on the ladder. Now we have the president of the United States talking about community colleges as an engine that will drive and sustain economic success in this country.”

It’s Chin’s first experience in the classroom since he graduated from high school. With three small children at home and no openings in other writing classes, the midnight course was his only option. “This is working out,” he told Goodnough. “I never really need more than about four hours of sleep anyway.”