Is 24 Too Old to Get a Bachelor’s Degree? What Parents Should Know
Taco Tuesday at my house last month, I was scraping guacamole off a ceramic plate, steam from the dishwasher fogging the window above the sink. Lila, my 24-year-old niece, stacked napkins when she said it: “I got my acceptance email yesterday. I start in the fall, elementary ed.” My sister, her mom, froze mid-wipe of the crumb-covered table. “24?” she said. “You’ll be 28 before you graduate. All your friends are already settled. Isn’t that too late?”
Lila graduated high school at 18, went to community college for a year and a half, hated it, dropped out to do a hair apprenticeship. She’s been cutting and coloring for four years, makes decent money, but the last year she’s volunteered every Saturday at the after-school program at our local elementary, and she got hooked. She says she spends all week listening to clients complain about their in-laws and bad root touch-ups, and all Saturday helping 8-year-olds with fractions and reading, and she’d rather do the second thing for the rest of her life.
As a high school guidance counselor for 18 years, I hear this exact question at least once a month from parents. Just this week, a dad came into my office to talk about his 24-year-old son, Jake, who quit his full-time construction job after four years to apply for a bachelor’s in nursing. This dad had a crumpled note in his pocket with all Jake’s high school friends’ milestones jotted down: one just bought a house, another got engaged, another is already an assistant manager at a car dealership. He kept saying “he’s falling so far behind, why start over now?”
Most of us grew up stuck on this idea that college is 18 to 22, straight after high school, any later and you’ve missed your window. But data from the National Center for Education Statistics says over 40% of undergrads are 25 or older, so 24 is actually younger than a big chunk of the current student population. That timeline we all carry around in our heads isn’t a rule, it’s just a default that worked for a small slice of people a generation ago.
That doesn’t mean parents don’t have real worries, of course. The biggest ones are money and wasted time, and those are valid. What I’ve learned from talking to dozens of families in this spot is that there are small, concrete things you can do to work through the worry instead of just pushing your kid to stick to the “on time” path.
First, change your opening question. Instead of leading with “aren’t you too old for this?” or “why would you throw away the career you already have?” which puts them on the defensive immediately, try asking “what’s the first thing you need help with right now?” When my sister replayed taco night in her head a couple days later, she called Lila and asked that question, and Lila immediately said she needed help figuring out which of her old community college credits would transfer. They sat down for an evening with the state school’s transfer credit website and worked through it line by line. Turns out Lila’s 1.5 years of community college all transferred, and the school gave her 3 elective credits for the business training she did for her hair apprenticeship, so she only needs three years of full-time study, not four. That cut a whole year off her timeline and thousands off her total tuition bill, just from sitting down together to sort it out.
Second, help them build a realistic budget that avoids the two big mistakes I see all the time: quitting work entirely and taking on six figures of unnecessary debt, or working 40 hours a week and taking 15 credits, which almost always leads to burning out after one semester. For Lila, that meant cutting her salon hours from five days a week to two, which covers her rent and groceries, so she only needs loans for tuition and books, not living expenses. Jake, the nursing student, arranged to work per diem construction on weekends, so he still has steady income but only puts in 16 hours a week during the semester. Neither of them are graduating debt-free, but neither are they drowning in loans before they even step into a classroom.
It’s also worth noting that 24-year-olds are almost always more focused than 18-year-olds going into college. I’ve seen kids who go straight from high school change majors three or four times, take six years to graduate, and end up in a field they don’t even like because they picked something to please their parents at 18. A 24-year-old who’s worked full time for a few years already knows what they don’t like, and what they do like, so they’re way less likely to waste time and money switching majors. A 2022 study out of the University of Pennsylvania found that non-traditional students in their 20s have a 12% higher graduation rate than traditional 18 to 22 year olds, for exactly that reason.
That doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing, of course. There are hard parts. Lila will be starting an entry-level teaching job when many people her age are already up for their first promotion. She might get tired of juggling work and school, she might even decide after a year that elementary ed isn’t for her after all. That’s okay, that’s not a waste. People change careers at 30, 40, 50 all the time; starting a bachelor’s at 24 is hardly the latest you can hit reset.
Last week I ran into Lila at the grocery store. She had a crumpled receipt sticking out of her pocket, a $10 used intro to education textbook under her arm, and was stopping for ice cream on her way home from a transfer advising meeting. She said the advisor told her she’d have to take a summer statistics class to get on track, and she’s already dreading every minute of it, but she still can’t wait to start. Her mom still brings up sometimes that hair is steady, that she could just do that forever. No one knows how this is going to turn out. The only thing that’s definitely true is that 24 isn’t too late. It’s just a different start time.
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