Yeah, I do have to say those numbers surprise me a little, and are subject to your personal circle of friends and acquaintances bias. Like I literally, out of a few hundred friends and acquaintances, cannot think of a single person who went into undergrad in their mid-20s. I know plenty who have gone into post-graduate education in their 30s and 40s, but every single person I can think of either finished their undergrad by 23, dropped out, or didn’t attend college. I can’t argue with the actual study or numbers, but it does surprise me as it is the complete opposite of my experience.
Good points–I probably was overstating with my “distinct minority” classification. But I do think it’s clear (and significant) that the number of “non-traditional” students is really quite large, and the “traditional” students are far from overwhelming in number. But the public discourse tends to focus almost exclusively on the “traditional” group.
Also, FWIW, I believe that the OP is a younger person (early 20s, I am guessing), and is (or was, until recently) a full-time college student. Over the past couple of years, they started a number of threads here about the college experience, and this thread of theirs, from last April, indicated that they were about to graduate.
I suspect it matters a great deal whether you’re just talking about undergraduates or including graduate students. Usually when people talk about “college” or “the college experience” they mean undergraduate students. Graduate school comes a lot closer to being “all about academics,” assuming academics includes things like research.
Community colleges in New York where I grew up and in the Bay Area are definitely non-residential with many older students. On the other hand I visited a community college in Western Wyoming which was strictly residential with as beautiful a campus as I’ve ever seen. I know nothing about their campus life, but I’d bet it was a lot more like traditional campus life than the community colleges near me.
In my estimation, that’s one of the biggest things the “traditional” college experience where you go off to full time college teaches. It’s a sort of intermediate step between living at home with your parents, and being entirely on your own- you (usually) aren’t expected to foot the entire bill for school, room, and board, you’re entirely on your own in terms of soft stuff like time management, dating, socializing, bedtimes, hobbies, etc… But you’ve also got a full time “job”, so to speak, in that you’re a student, and you are presumably accountable to your parents for how you do.
It’s entirely possible to balance academics and non-academic stuff and succeed at both. Lots of people handle it to varying degrees. But I think that emphasizing one or the other tends to have less than optimal results, especially the non-academic stuff.
That’s extremely dependent on what school you’re talking about. My alma mater (Texas A&M) was very light on night classes, and generally didn’t cater to non-traditional students much. Most of that was because it’s not anywhere near a major metro area, and its local area isn’t large enough to support it. Conversely, where I went to graduate school (University of Texas at Dallas) does greatly cater to non-traditional students- enough to where you can literally get grad degrees fully through night courses, and as a part-time student. That’s because it’s a public Tier 1 research university situated smack dab in the middle of the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country.
I would find that surprising as the years immediately after high school seems to be when most people first go off to college. Now my experience may be skewed from having attended a fairly prestigious 4 year private college and working in a field that tends to hire from similar schools.
Do you include graduate school in that analysis? Because I did, in fact, attend business school as a part-time evening commuter student while working.
The “fratbro” experience was also pretty prominent at my college as well, for better or worse. There was still a balance between drunken tomfoolery and actually graduating (which many didn’t). While I did enjoy most of my college experience being in a fraternity and felt it afforded me lasting friendships and a deeper connection to the school, I would be lying if I said I didn’t see the negatives. By its very nature, I think a fraternity system (at least one as prominent at my school) ultimately does promote a culture of elitism, drunken jockocricy, toxic manliness, and a sense that the rules REALLY don’t apply to you.
Well…
- Thursdays were usually underground stuff like “hotel parties”1 or playing beer games like Asshole 2 or Beruit3
- Fridays and Saturdays you usually had “cocktails”4 or the stereotypical Animal House style parties at the fraternities
- Saturday tailgates if there was a home football game
- After our fraternity house meeting on Sundays, some of us like to grab a beer down at the local college bar
- Who doesn’t like a few beers watching Monday Night Football
- Forgot - on Fridays we often would drink at this all
- Sometimes after our hockey games, we’d grab a drink with the opposing team (we were a club team so our league was a co-ed mix of local colleges and men’s league bar teams of out of work steel workers…so that was always interesting)
And of course, certain times of year lent themselves to excessive drinking - Greek Week, Football Rivalry Week, Spring Break, 8 weeks of fraternity rush5 , 8 weeks of fraternity pledging6 , the few days between when you were allowed to move in and when classes started (typically used for orientation by freshmen), and finals week once your tests were done.
In retrospect, I probably should have been a bit more disciplined in my studies. Because my grades did suck ass. And it did hurt me initially in my job search.
- Parties where the fraternities would serve beer out of the individual rooms (like the floor of a hotel) instead of their designated common area party room.
- A drinking game similar to Uno or Go Fish
- A drinking game played with cups of beer and ping pong balls on a large table that isn’t “Beer Pong”
- Basically what it sounds like. Getting dressed up in ties and suits like Yuppie douchebags and drinking shitty mixed drinks
- The period where fraternities and sororities select new recruits (pledges)
- The period when the new recruits (pledges) are inducted / indoctrinated into the fraternity
I’m 99% sure that at least part of the reason you find it surprising is because of your experience and background before college , because I don’t find it surprising at all. But I went to CUNY, which I’m sure has a very different student population from your college. I can tell that because you say the years immediately after high school seem to be when most people first go off to college. You seem to assume that the reason for the median age being 23 and the average 26 is because people didn’t go to college right after high school. While I know there are plenty of people who do that , I also know it’s not the only reason. There are plenty of people who go to college right after high school and take more than four years to finish for a variety of reasons. I attended full-time right out of high school - it took me five years to finish because I could only manage 12 credits a semester along with a nearly full-time job to pay my tuition and other expenses. I knew people who started full-time right after high school and then something happened (usually a baby) that caused them to have to drop to part-time and meant it took 6-8 years before they actually graduated. There most likely weren’t any people like that at your prestigious private college.
Then I graduated and got professional jobs - where I saw loads of people who got support jobs at my employer without a degree and started attending part-time with tuition reimbursement and moved into professional jobs once they got the degree. I suspect it’s somewhat unusual for someone in that situation to continue at the same employer - but when it happens, it makes it obvious that the person who was a typist when I got hired and moved into a professional slot ten years later got the required degree recently.
Exactly so. My best friend has a 25-year-old son, and a 23-year-old daughter. Both of the kids went away to college immediately after high school, where they had been honor students; both of them were back home, having withdrawn from their original colleges, by the end of their freshman years. Both of them were dealing with emotional issues, which were interfering with their ability to excel at school, and they both then spent a year or so in therapy, and working, while they decided what to do next.
They both then resumed school at a local community college, then transferred back to bigger schools once they got their feet back under themselves, academically.
The son will be graduating this spring with a degree in IT (and various certifications), just shy of his 26th birthday; he would have graduated last spring, but COVID played havoc with the availability of a couple of classes that he needed for his degree, and delayed him for another year. The daughter is effectively in her junior year, from the standpoint of her classwork, and is progressing well towards a degree in English, which she should complete next year, at age 24.
Here’s another interesting chart from 2016. It looks like a lot of the older students are in for-profit institutions:
That chart is consistent with my expectations. I would have assumed the traditional 4-year colleges would skew younger while 2 year and for-profit colleges would skew towards older students looking to go back and get a degree to improve their job prospects.
I would even hypothesize that there is a correlation between school selectiveness / prestige and skewing towards younger students.
Which I think kind of speaks to the “trouble” with college not being just about academics. If you just want to learn accounting or computer programming or any field for that matter, you can probably get a decent education pretty much anywhere. Companies that hire people out of Harvard and other elite schools don’t hire them because Harvard’s finance (or whatever) program is so much better than Boston College’s. They hire them because the school’s elite status is a signal that this person a) is “smart” because they went to a top school and b) is part of the sort of elite culture who would fit in well within our company’s culture of elite-ness.
That’s why students in the “Trouble with Harvard” link Q.Q.Switcheroo provided can spend 4 years focusing on lacrosse or crew or playing the cello. Because they aren’t hired for what they know or can do. They are hired because they are part of a network of “elites” being groomed for jobs in management or weird esoteric finance stuff.
At least, that’s my theory.
This is bang on. I have little to add other than this fact makes me feel like the entire educational system is a scam.
Can confirm. There’s a lot of discussion in the higher ed world about this, as well as the other ways selective institutions are non-representative of higher education as a whole (in ways that people crafting education policy often don’t recognize, because THEY usually attended one of these selective institutions, most often directly out of high school without any gaps or time off along the way).
“Stopping out” – e.g., taking a semester or two off to deal with health / family / financial issues – or otherwise taking longer than four years to complete a degree is also tremendously common even among students who are basically in the traditional age range. To give you an idea, at my university (which is, I think, fairly typical of small, not-super-selective four-year state schools), the four-year graduation rate for students who enter as first-time full-time freshmen tends to hover around 25 to 30%, which sounds dismal, but it drifts up to around 50% if you track them for eight years. (Some of the others may also transfer and complete a degree elsewhere, which we don’t track, and which the federal government also does an extremely poor job of tracking.)
No. It’s just that networking is part of education, everywhere. Traditionally, if you went to a state college, you were networking with an eye to a life in the local area. If you went to an Ivy League school, you were networking for a career in more nationally prominent areas. There’s some elitism baked in, which (in my opinion) is a poor value to support, but not a scam.
The people you get your education with have always been part of the process, and students have always learned from and leveraged their peers as much as their professors. That’s not always stated openly, but it’s not a secret. (Though I didn’t know it when I was in college and would have probably gotten more out of it if I had.)
Unless you’re studying something like engineering.
To the OP, college was critical to my development beyond how I can express. That said, I was fortunate to have the privilege for that to be the case.
One thing I learned in grad school was that undergrads don’t leverage their professors enough. Not in class but outside of class, volunteering to help do research for example.
Plus alumni clubs are good places to network after college, but it helps to have gone to a college prestigious enough to have clubs.
People work even at Harvard. There is a definite halo effect, some from having fellow alums in positions of power, and some from having non-alums impressed by a top college.
That’s because it is true.
Using the phrase “the college experience” means leafy green campuses, fraternities, and parties, at age 18-22.
There are lots of other ways to be a student: older , part-time, community college, etc. But those ways are not described as “going to college”—it is better described as “attending classes to get a degree and a job”
Of course, there’s plenty of good reason for all those ways, appropriate for different people at different stages of life. I’m not surprised that 40% of all the students are not “going to college”. Most of those people have actual responsibilities in life, so they may be taking part-time classes , for more than 4 years. So that adds up over time to a lot more bodies in the classroom in the local city-- more than the number of bodies on the leafy green campus located a two hour drive outside the city.
But what those (usually older), more responsible students are doing is not getting the “college experience”–it is getting a practical education.
And that ain’t so sexy, And it sure gets a lot less publicity in the news when spring break rolls around.
Networking is not in the mission statement of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. I checked.
The thing that makes a diploma from these schools more desirable than a diploma from Boston College isn’t the quality of learning available there, it’s the ability to write the word Harvard on your resume.
I admit, this is a personal pet peeve of mine, so take it as such. I hate the fact that educational institutions, going down all the way to pre-K, have a public mission of imparting knowledge, uplifting children, providing support and growth to all of their students, while in actuality, they act to stratify and grade kids like slabs of meat, to ensure we have well defined groups of students to send to the next level. This whole top school vs second tier school thing is the same, it’s not about the education, it’s about what strata you get to be in.