Is 24 Too Old to Get a Bachelor’s Degree? What Parents Should Know
The roast chicken platter was still on the table, crumbs scattered across the cloth placemats, when my niece Lila dropped the news last month. She’d quit her admin job at the downtown dentist office, turned in her key to the apartment she shared with two roommates, and was moving back home for a year to start prerequisites for a bachelor’s in nursing. My brother-in-law Mark wiped gravy off his thumb and asked the question I hear from at least two parents a month in my work as a high school guidance counselor: “But honey, you’re 24. Isn’t that too late to start a bachelor’s degree?”
Lila twisted the label off her root beer and didn’t look up for a minute. She’d graduated high school at 18, wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, so she took the admin job instead of taking on student debt. For two years, she saved a little, helped her grandma with physical therapy after knee replacement, and figured out the only time she left work feeling good was when she was helping patients schedule appointments and walk out to their cars. Nursing made sense, but she’d carried the idea for two years that she’d already missed her window. “Everyone else my age is already halfway done,” she said that night.
We moved the conversation out to the porch, where the air still smelled like cut grass from that morning’s yard work. I told Mark I’ve worked with enough students going back to school at 24 to know that age is almost never the real problem. Last year alone, I worked with 11 students 23 or older starting their first bachelor’s. Only one dropped out before the first year ended. Compare that to the 18-year-olds I send off to college every year: almost a third drop out before sophomore year, most because they never knew what they wanted in the first place. A 24-year-old who’s already spent a few years in the workforce usually doesn’t waste semesters switching majors or skipping class to party. That’s a tangible advantage most parents don’t count.
The first mistake most parents make, I told him, is leading with the age question. We grew up with a rigid script: graduate high school at 18, start college, graduate at 22, get a job, settle down. That script hasn’t been standard for 20 years, but a lot of us still carry it around like it’s rule of law. Instead of asking if 24 is too late, the first concrete step is to sit down and go over your kid’s plan line by line to check for gaps that actually matter. We did that right there on the porch.
Lila had already done most of the work. She applied to the local community college, which charges $150 a credit – half what the state university costs. She got three elective credits for her two years of medical admin work, so she doesn’t have to take the intro healthcare class most freshmen need. After two years of prereqs, she’ll transfer to the state university’s BSN program, which guarantees admission for community college students with a 3.5 GPA or higher. She’s on track to graduate at 28, which felt old to Mark until I ran the basic numbers with him. Entry-level BSN nurses in our state make an average of $77,000 a year. Lila was making $36,000 a year as a dental admin. Even after paying tuition, and even if she works only 30 years after graduation, that’s a difference of more than a million dollars in lifetime earnings. Age as a barrier fades pretty fast when you lay that out.
Mark still worried about fitting in. “All the other kids will be 18, fresh out of high school. She’ll be the odd one out,” he said. I told him about Jake, a former student of mine who was 24 when he started an engineering bachelor’s after three years framing houses with his dad. He thought the same thing before he started. Turns out, almost 40% of undergrads in the U.S. are 25 or older, and that doesn’t count people like Lila who are just a few years off the traditional timeline. When Lila went to orientation a few weeks ago, she texted me that half the people in her small group were over 22, and the 18-year-old sitting next to her said she was jealous Lila already knew what she wanted. No one cares about age when everyone’s just trying to pass midterms and pay rent.
That doesn’t mean there are no trade-offs, of course. Lila is putting off saving for a down payment, she works 20 hours a week at the campus health center to cover tuition, so she has far less free time to go out with friends than she did a year ago. Mark still worries that if Lila wants kids, she’ll start that later than he and my sister did. But Lila says she’d rather start a family when she has a stable job with good health insurance than rush into it and be stuck living paycheck to paycheck. It’s her call to make, not ours.
Lila started her first chemistry class last Monday. She texted me a blurry photo after the first lecture, holding her new lab notebook, grinning. Mark helped her move her stuff into the spare bedroom last month, and he still teases her sometimes about being an “old college kid,” but he also stayed up last weekend helping her build a new desk for her room.
I still get that question every other month at parent meetings, from parents whose kids took a few years off to work, or care for a family member, or just figure out what they want: is 24 too late for a bachelor’s degree? I don’t have a neat, one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on the person, their plan, and what they want out of life. So far, for Lila, the only thing that’s too late is the idea that everyone has to follow the same old timeline. We’ll see how it goes, but right now, that’s enough.
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