Is 24 Too Old To Get A Bachelor’s Degree? What Parents Should Know
The kitchen still smells like burnt taco shells and store-bought salsa when Marnie leans across the coffee table, voice tight, and asks me the question she’s been holding in all night. Is 24 too old to get a bachelor’s degree? My 10-year-old just spilled lemonade all over the rug, and her son Javi is over on the couch helping my kid pick up the scattered game pieces, so I don’t answer right away. I know why she’s asking. Javi quit his full-time construction job three days before, the one he’s held since he graduated high school, and told his parents he’s enrolling in the bachelor’s of nursing program at the state university starting this fall.
Six years ago, when Javi graduated high school, he had no clue what he wanted to do. None of us pushed him to go to college right away — we all told him to get a job, save some money, avoid the debt that so many of our friends’ kids are drowning in. He took that advice, worked 50-hour weeks framing houses, put away $18,000 in a savings account, and spent the last two years taking general ed classes at the community college two nights a week after work. Marnie knew he was taking classes, but she always thought it was just something to fill time, not a step towards quitting his job and getting a full degree.
Her fear isn’t crazy. She’s looking at the timeline we all have memorized: 18, high school graduation. 22, college graduation. By 28, when Javi would graduate, his peers will already have six years of work experience under their belts, promotions, 401(k)s. She’s scared he’s throwing away six years of work to start over from zero, that he’ll end up with debt and nothing to show for it.
I work part-time as a high school counselor, so I get this question more often than you’d think, not just for 24-year-olds, but 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds too. Last year, a former student emailed me to tell me she’d quit her bar management job to go back for her bachelor’s in elementary education at 25, and her parents were convinced she’d thrown her life away. What I’ve learned, after talking to dozens of people in this spot, is that most of the worry comes from that old, unspoken timeline we all carry around, not the actual reality of going to college at 24.
First, I pulled out my phone and showed Marnie the stat I keep handy: the average age of an undergraduate student in the U.S. is 26. Half of all undergrads are over 25. 24 isn’t some crazy outlier, it’s almost average. Then I asked her when was the last time she asked Javi what his actual plan was, instead of assuming he was being impulsive. She admitted she’d been so upset she hadn’t let him talk through it. That’s the first concrete thing I tell parents when they ask this question: lead with asking for the plan, not leading with your worry. Most 24-year-olds don’t decide to go back for a bachelor’s on a drunk weekend or a whim. They’ve been thinking about it for years, usually because they’re unhappy in their current line of work and they’ve already done the math.
When Javi sits down with us, he walks through it step by step: he already has 30 credit hours of general eds that transfer, so he only needs two and a half years of full-time school instead of four. His savings cover 75% of his tuition, he’s got a part-time job lined up working the front desk at the campus gym that covers his rent. Starting pay for a new grad nurse in our area is $38 an hour, which is almost double what he makes now. He says he’s tired of coming home with sore knees and no idea where his job will be in 20 years when his body gives out. He also says he was scared he’d be the oldest guy in his classes, until he looked up the program’s student profile and found 40% of the nursing undergrads are over 23.
That’s the second thing I tell parents: being an older student is almost always an advantage, not a disadvantage. The 18-year-olds in class are still figuring out how to do their laundry and how to not skip 8 a.m. lectures to go to a party. The 24-year-old knows how to show up, how to manage a schedule, how to study because they know exactly what they’re working for. My former student who started at 25 graduated with a 3.8 GPA, got hired at a local elementary school before she walked at graduation, because her years of experience managing bars made her way better at handling classroom management than most new 22-year-old grads. If you’re a parent worried about your kid going back at 24, instead of telling them they’re too old, ask to help them sort through transfer credits and local scholarship options. Most of them just haven’t thought through all the little logistics, and a second set of eyes helps way more than a lecture about falling behind.
Marnie still worries some. She texted me last week after seeing a TikTok of a 22-year-old nurse who already bought her first house, and said she couldn’t shake the feeling Javi is falling behind. But she also helped him move into his new apartment off campus last weekend, and bought him a new laptop for classes with the graduation gift money she’d been saving for years. We still don’t know how it’ll go. Javi might struggle with organic chemistry, he might decide nursing isn’t actually what he wants after all, he might end up taking an extra semester to graduate. But what’s the alternative? Him staying in a job that hurts his body and bores him, until he’s 40 and wondering what would have happened if he’d gone when he was 24. Most of us don’t get our lives sorted out by 22 anyway. 24 is just the first chance Javi’s had to actually go after what he wants. It’s not too late. It’s just early enough for him to have a whole career after he graduates.
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