Is 24 Too Old to Get a Bachelor’s Degree? A Guidance Counselor’s Real Perspective
Last Tuesday, I was shoving stacks of conference sign-in sheets into my desk drawer and turning off my classroom projector when there was a soft knock on my office door. I almost called out that I was heading out, but I recognized the name when Mia Carter introduced herself—she was a sophomore in my advisory 8 years ago, back when I was still splitting my time between teaching 10th grade and advising. She was holding a lukewarm oat milk latte, had her 11-month-old son strapped to her chest in a faded carrier, and one foot shoved into a scuffed black ankle boot from a rec league soccer sprain the week before.
She said her mom sent her—she’d been tossing around applying to the bachelor’s program in early childhood education at the local state university for months, but couldn’t shake the thought that 24 was just too late to start. “I saw a reel the other day that said anyone who hasn’t started their degree by 22 is already playing catch-up that they’ll never win,” she said, bouncing the baby when he started to fuss against her shoulder. “All my cousins went straight after high school. They’re already done, already getting raises. I’ll be 28 by the time I graduate. That feels so old.”
I remembered her situation from when she was in high school. Her dad had been laid off from the manufacturing plant the summer before her junior year, and she picked up a 30-hour a week waitressing job at the diner downtown to cover the family’s electric and water bills when her mom’s hours as a nurse’s aide got cut. She graduated high school with a 3.4 GPA, but never filled out a single college application—she couldn’t afford to quit working, and didn’t want to take on debt when her parents still needed her help with bills. After graduation, she got a full-time aide job at the daycare down the street from her apartment, met her partner, had the baby, and just six months ago, the daycare director told her they’d cover half her tuition if she got her degree, and save her a spot as lead teacher once she graduated. It was exactly what she said she wanted back when she was 16, when we talked about career day.
That’s the thing I see over and over, as someone who’s worked with students of all ages for 12 years. The timeline we’ve all internalized—high school at 18, college by 22, career by 24—isn’t a rule, it’s just one common path. For a lot of people, life gets in the way first. Family needs, health issues, figuring out what you actually want before you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a degree. None of that makes 24 too late.
I’ve had more than a few parents come to me worried about their adult kid, saying “they’re 24, shouldn’t they have started already?” and I tell them three small, specific things instead of the generic “be supportive” line. First, don’t lead with “won’t you be 28 by the time you graduate?” Nine times out of 10, your kid has already done that math 100 times. Bringing it up just adds unnecessary anxiety that doesn’t help anything. Second, ask them to walk you through their end goal, not the timeline. For Mia, it’s simple: she already has a job waiting when she finishes, the tuition is almost fully covered, and it’s going to get her an $18 an hour raise that will let her and her partner save for a house. That’s a concrete goal, not a vague “I need a degree” impulse. If the goal lines up, the starting age doesn’t matter. Third, help them look for flexible programs that fit their life, not the other way around. Most public universities now have part-time, night, and hybrid programs built specifically for people who work full time or have kids. I helped Mia pull up the early childhood cohort at her school that only meets two nights a week and one Saturday a month—she can keep her full-time aide job, and her partner only has to switch one shift a week to watch the baby. That’s a doable plan, not a huge, life-upending change.
A couple years ago, I looked up national data on this because I got tired of people saying older students don’t finish. Turns out, students who start college at 24 or older actually have slightly higher six-year graduation rates than 18-year-old traditional students. Most of them know exactly why they’re there, they don’t change majors three times because they’re figuring themselves out, and they don’t waste semesters skipping classes for unimportant reasons. Mia told me that when she was 18, she was so burnt out from working 30 hours a week that she never would have been able to focus on classes anyway. Now she knows she loves working with toddlers, she knows what she wants out of the degree, and she’s willing to put in the work. That’s a better starting position than most 18-year-olds I see.
I ran into Mia’s mom at the grocery store this Saturday, and she said Mia turned in her application last night. She still has bad nights—she lies awake on the couch after the baby goes to bed, worrying that she’s too old, that she’s going to mess up and waste time, that she’ll miss too many of the baby’s first milestones while she’s studying. I told her that’s normal. There’s no perfect path. The kids who go straight out of high school mess up too—they drop out after two years, they take on $30k in debt for a degree they never use, they switch careers at 30 and end up starting over anyway, just like people who start later.
Mia’s path is just different, not slower, not worse. I don’t know if everything will work out exactly how she plans. She might have to take a semester off if the baby gets sick or her hours change. She might decide she wants to switch to a different focus halfway through. But 24 isn’t too late. It’s just the age she’s at when she’s ready to start. That’s all that matters.
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