Yahoo Finance Older college graduates earn just as much as their younger peers
Here’s a bit of good news for late-blooming college graduates: People who earn their college degrees later in their careers actually wind up earning just as much as younger graduates, according to a new study by Gallup.
In a survey of more than 11,000 both nontraditional college graduates (those who earned their degree after age 25) and traditional graduates (the 18-24 cohort) who graduated between 1900 and 2014, Gallup found both groups had comparable earnings records.
For example, 15% of younger graduates, whose average age was 33, earned between $60,000 and $90,000. Comparatively, 16% of older graduates, whose average age was 45, earned enough to put them in the $60,000 to $90,000 range as well.
As you can see in the chart below, nontraditional and traditional college graduates were almost perfectly matched in each income bracket Gallup looked at, whether they were rich, poor or somewhere in between.
“From an income perspective, it shows that starting college young or starting older still pays off,” says Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. “College is an equalizer.”
There is, of course, at least one caveat to Gallup’s findings: lost lifetime wages. If older college graduates didn’t work at all in the years before they earned their degree -- or if they worked in lower-paid, entry-level jobs -- they would have lost out on earnings, not to mention the money that wasn’t being saved and invested in retirement accounts. Gallup didn’t ask survey respondents about prior work history, but they did look at other factors that could help paint a fuller picture of the overall well-being of college graduates.
What they found in these areas didn’t bode quite as well for nontraditional graduates.
Despite earning just as much as their younger peers, the nontraditional graduates trailed traditional graduates in all five elements of well-being measured by the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index: purpose, social, financial, community and physical.
Nontraditional graduates lagged behind most in their sense of purpose (job satisfaction and motivation) and, ironically, financial well-being (being able to manage their finances and reduce stress). But given the steep difference in age between nontraditional and traditional graduates surveyed (45 years old vs. 33 years old), older graduates may simply be dealing with more responsibilities and stressors of adulthood that younger graduates haven’t yet encountered (kids AND a mortgage, for example). Earning a degree while holding down a job and raising a family is no small undertaking.
As Busteed notes, nontraditional graduates are slightly more likely to take on student debt, which previous Gallup research has linked to lower well-being. Also, 58% of nontraditional graduates are first-generation graduates, compared with 35% of traditional graduates, according to Gallup, which may point to a lower-income upbringing.
Roughly 40% of today’s college students are over age of 25, according to the U.S. Department of Education. With the results of its survey, Gallup is hoping to create a benchmark to help universities across the country measure how well their alumni are truly faring.
“Right now, colleges have very limited data on alumni. At best they know if you’ve given them money,” Busteed says. “[With our data] they can go back to their programs and policies from a service perspective and figure out how they can move the needle.”
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