Is 24 Too Late to Get a Bachelor’s Degree? A High School Counselor Explains
My office smells like lemon cleaner and the half-eaten peanut granola bar I left on my desk after lunch last Tuesday when Mia knocked. She graduated from my high school six years ago, and I’d watched her stop by the counseling office off and on ever since: first to ask for a letter of rec for community college, then to tell me she was dropping out after a year to stay home with her mom, who’d just been diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. She slid into the plastic chair across from my desk, twisted her coffee shop lanyard around her finger, and got right to the point. “I want to finish my bachelor’s in elementary education. But is 24 too old to start?”
Mia told me her dad had already said she was wasting time. All her friends from high school already graduated, got full-time jobs, some are even buying condos. By the time she finishes a four-year degree (even part-time, which she plans to do), she’ll be 28. That’s half a decade behind where everyone else is, he said. I get this question at least once a month: from 23 year olds who took a few years off to work, from parents calling me panicking that their kid is throwing their life away by starting late. The default timeline everyone carries in their head—graduate high school at 18, college at 22, career at 23—feels so fixed that any deviation feels like a failure.
When parents call me worried about their adult kid starting a bachelor’s at 24 or older, the first thing I tell them is to stop leading with “is this too late?” and instead ask two specific questions: How many credits do you already have that will transfer? What sources of funding are already available to you? Vague panic about being “behind” doesn’t help anyone, but mapping out the actual details usually clears up most of the worry. For Mia, she’d earned 18 transferable credits during that first year at community college, which cuts a full semester off her time. The national coffee chain she works for offers $5,250 a year in tuition reimbursement for part-time employees, which covers almost all of her tuition for the two classes a semester she plans to take. Since her mom’s cancer is in remission now and needs less full-time care, Mia can live at home rent-free, so she won’t have to take out tens of thousands in student loans just to cover housing. That’s not a crazy risk—it’s a slow, manageable plan.
Most people still picture college as a campus full of 18 to 22 year olds straight out of high school, but that’s not the reality anymore. A few years back I pulled up national numbers for a parent workshop, and almost 40% of undergrads are over 22, so 24 isn’t some weird outlier. I teach a night gen ed class at the local community college once a semester, and last term half my students were between 23 and 28. Most work 20 to 30 hours a week, most have been out of high school for a few years. No one stares at the oldest person in the room, because half the room is the oldest person.
The biggest mistake I see parents make with this is jumping to pushback before they look at the actual plan. Generic phrases like “don’t you think you’re too old?” or “why waste the money?” shut down the conversation before anyone can work through the details. The best thing you can do as a parent or caregiver is offer one specific small thing, instead of generic support or generic criticism. Offer to look over their application essay. Offer to help them search for tuition benefits at their current job (most large retail, food service, and healthcare companies offer this, even for part-timers, and most people don’t even know it exists). Offer to have them over for dinner once a week once classes start, so they don’t have to cook after a long day of work and studying. That’s way more useful than just saying “I support you” if you don’t follow it up with action. Mia’s dad was against the idea at first, but when he realized she’d already worked out most of the costs on her own, he offered to buy her a new laptop for school, which she couldn’t afford on her tip income. That one small gesture shifted the whole conversation from “you’re making a mistake” to “I’ve got your back.”
Of course, starting at 24 isn’t easy. It’s harder to juggle work and school than it is to go full-time straight out of high school, when you don’t have a job or family responsibilities to manage. Mia still worries about feeling awkward the first week of class, about being the oldest person in the lecture hall, about missing out on trips with friends because she has to study. I don’t sugarcoat that for her. I also tell her that my own mom got her bachelor’s in nursing when she was 27. I was 10, and I remember she studied after work every night, failed her first pharmacology test, and we ate frozen pizza for dinner three nights a week for four years. She graduated at 31, worked as a pediatric nurse for 32 years, and retired last year. If she’d waited for the “right age” to start, she never would have had that career she loved so much.
Last I heard, Mia turned in her application a week ago, and she’s picking up extra Sunday shifts to save up for textbooks. No one has gotten an acceptance letter yet, no one knows if she’ll love elementary ed or if she’ll change her mind halfway through. She might take an extra semester, she might take on too much at first and need to drop a class. None of that is a failure. That’s just how college works, no matter what age you start. The fixed 18-22 timeline that everyone uses as a benchmark never was one size fits all. It fits less than ever now. 24 isn’t too late. It’s just a different starting line.
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