Mac, is the age limitation because students in your location can go to med/law schools straight out of the equivalent of high school? As you may know, med/law students in the US and Canada are typically required to have a bachelor’s degree first, so any age limit (if one exists, secret or not) would necessarily have to be pushed back.
No, it’s not that.
When I went to med school (in Canada) there definitely was a ‘rule’ (how inflexible, I don’t know) that placed an upper limit on how old one could be at the time of enrollment (not quite the same as how old you could be at graduation and done that way in order to allow for delays from things like illness once you had already started your program). IIRC, that limit was 30, but I may well be misremembering the actual number.
The underlying idea was that since the Ontario tax payer was going to foot the large majority of your bill (at that time, med school fees were heavily subsidized, something like 600 bucks a year!), you needed to able to repay them by being able to work as an MD for thirty years (or whatever the true number was).
As an aside, for those who assert that such a rule wouldn’t be brooked in the US, is there not an age limit for students entering its military academies, i.e. West Point, Anapolis, etc.?
Yes, there is. Actually, it goes both ways. There’s both a maximum AND a minimum age for entrance to the service academies. You don’t see either restriction for normal 4 year colleges and universities. Actually, we often get news stories about the grandmother or the precocious 10 year old who gets a college degree.
Of course, there’s a bit of a difference here. The service academies are specifically tasked with providing a portion of the officer cadre of the US armed forces, for which there are also age requirements.
There are all sorts of exceptions we make for our military that we wouldn’t allow for civilian occupations. For example, sex discrimination in several military occupations is still perfectly legal, including serving on submarines or for occupations where there is a high likelihood of experiencing live combat.
Another example is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. A regular civilian company could face rather stiff consequences from dismissing an employee for being homosexual. The same consequences do not exist for the military. This has been the case for a number of years.
The bottom line is that in the US, you aren’t going to see age-based restrictions as a matter of policy for educational institutions meant for the average Joe.
As for the law school requirement, I would be surprised if an accredited program allowed 10 year old credits to transfer. The knowledge may not change much for some courses, but accreditation places time limits on credits to make sure degrees are valid.
I know this is the case for several undergraduate and graduate programs as well. My own university had something like a 14 semester expiration on most undergraduate credits and a 10 year limit on the time to begin a Ph.D program and finish (otherwise you were just flat out - oh, and usually very few graduate level credits were allowed to transfer from other schools on top of the residency requirements).
This type of admission policy was discussed in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 SF novel “Looking Backward”. In his future world of 2000, university education is 100% subsidized by the government and everyone who can work has a government job (centrally planned economy to the max), and the cap on age at admission is precisely so that upon graduation, you will be able to serve at least a certain number of years to pay it off before reaching the mandatory retirement age.
Actually, as others have noted, your coursework can indeed become “stale.” Our institution places a 9 year cap on courses, if I’m not mistaken. We had a student who dropped out of the PhD program in the coursework phase and wanted to come back 10 years later. It was pointed out to him that he’d have to retake all of his coursework… he demurred after hearing this.
I think I also remember reading through the admission process for a nursing program (or an allied health program), and it specifically stated that there were health qualification criteria, I believe the point being that there’s no point in getting a nursing qualification if you can’t qualify for a nursing license.
Now, if you wanted to do an MA in English Literature at most schools and you were 90 and needed a wheelchair, oxygen tank, and a 24/7 nurse, and you had a bachelor’s degree and otherwise qualified for the program, they wouldn’t have a problem with that.
But is it because in general, college credits “expire”, or because the classes that you took 10 years ago are no longer relevant or don’t meet the degree requirements? I took COBOL programming… a class that I presume is no longer taught anywhere, nor relevant to a comp sci degree. Would my credit for calculus be considered “stale” just because I took it more than 10 years ago?
If so, what’s the rationale?