Is it more common to graduate college at 23 than it is to graduate high school at 19?

I’m wondering because I’ll be 23 when I graduate college. In high school, it was extremely rare to turn 19 before graduation. I know I would have felt really bad if I had. Is it different with college?

Since it’s much more common for people to take time out before going to college, or during college, than it is to do so during high school, it follows that a higher proportion of college graduates will be above the “standard” graduation age than is the case for high school graduates.

Plus, by the time you get to 22 or 23, people are less fixated on how old you are. (And so are you.)

Lots of people turn 19 before graduating high school. You just know people who never considered dropping out and who didn’t flunk a grade. The average age of graduation from college is somewhere between 23 and 24.

Typical college graduate in the UK is 21/22 years old, depending if they took a gap year or not.

A lot of people graduate HS at 17. I did, but didn’t graduate college until I was 22 (5-year plan). In my case, I changed majors (engineering) after three years, which necessitated taking enough additional courses to knock me back. I did have some “extra” time my last year, but my advisor and I managed to find enough courses to keep me busy.

Very much more common, for several reasons. Most people go through their compulsory schooling in lock-step. They start kindergarten sometime between 5 and 6 (give or take), and they advance through the grades each year until they graduate from high school at 17 or 18. Graduating at 19 would generally mean that you repeated a grade, or that you started high school at 7 years old, neither of which are terribly common.

While there are class years in college, the actual system isn’t nearly so rigid in practice. You basically have to take the required courses for your major, with the appropriate prerequisite classes, and get the proper number of credit hours, and then you graduate. If you manage this in like 3 years worth of crazy-huge loads taken fall, spring and summer, then that works. If you take like 12 hours a semester just fall and spring and take 7 years to do it, that’s cool as well. Most people fall somewhere in the middle and do it somewhere between 4 and 6 years.

So if you start college at 18, and it takes you 5 years, you’re graduating at 22 if you graduate in 4 years/8 semesters exactly, which isn’t unusual, but isn’t necessarily the way most people do it. If you take a high hour-requirement major, like engineering, or you take a gap year, or do an internship, or anything that takes you out of doing your academic coursework exactly in order, you’re not going to graduate in 4 years. 5 years isn’t uncommon at all, especially in engineering and the sciences.

No one cares about the age someone graduates from college Many people go back to school at older ages. When I look at someone’s resume or interview someone for a job, I see many applicants with more than four years between high school and college (or, just as often, we don’t even know when they graduated from H.S.). If anything, it’s a positive, as I figure they were really motivated to go to college and didn’t just roll in following high school.

And the average age of college graduates will change a lot more over time, for a variety of reasons. For instance, when there are a lot of returning military veterans from a war, many will be entering college under the GI bill at an age a few years older than the average HS grad. At times when it is socially in vogue to take some sort of break between HS and college or during college (some sort of volunteer experience, or simply a “Wanderjahr”), the average will bump up. During the early part of the recession, a lot of people who couldn’t find work simply went back to school hoping to be more employable when things improved. A lot of them may have entered graduate programs, but there would also have been some HS or 2 year college grads or college dropouts who decided that maybe they should get a four year degree.

It’s not even remarkable to graduate from college at age 63. Well, not remarkable at the college, at least. You will probably end up with a retiree in at least one or two of your classes, and nobody makes a big deal of it.

True, but I don’t think they are in high enough numbers to skew the average much. They get noticed amid the sea of 20 year old students, but it’s actually a pretty small fraction of the student population. That doesn’t change the fact that we are mostly in agreement that it’s not uncommon to graduate college at an age in excess of the expected 22, sometimes far in excess.

I would reiterate that the “returning veterans” factor can be very large. I was an undergrad during an interval that spanned the end of the Vietnam war. Campuses were simply FULL of Vietnam vets who were a few years older than the rest of the students.

It suprisingly hard for me to find a median age for bachelor’s degree graduates, but I’d guess these days it’s probably around 23. The best data I can find is from the US census bureau in 1960, reporting the median age as 23, but that’s a long time ago. There’s certainly nothing weird about graduating at 23. Most students don’t finish in four years anymore.

What’s the issue here? Why is anybody surprised?

This is the whole answer.
Children don’t have any choice in their schooling. They finish 12 years of school in 12 years. Dropping out is a very bad idea.
College is voluntary; you can start, stop, drop out, re-enroll , and graduate at any age you want.

When I was a lad, Ontario had a fifth year of high school, and so it was routine for any university-bound students to graduate at 19. (Or if born later in the year, to turn 19 the same year they graduated.) This was discontinued, however, several years ago.