College Population Gets Older More Americans Over 40 In School As Boomers Age

As baby boomers age and the work force changes, more and more Americans over 40 are going to college.

Just 477,000 people older than 40 were in college in 1970. By 1993, that number had more than tripled, to over 1.6 million, according to a study released Wednesday.

That’s partly due to aging baby boomers. People over 40 made up 36 percent of the U.S. population in 1970 but 40 percent in 1995, according to the study, which relied on census figures.

“By sheer numbers, the baby boomers are revolutionizing our educational worlds, as they’ve been doing all along,” said Ted Freeman, president of the Education Resources Institute, which co-sponsored the study.

But demographic shifts cannot explain the entire boom in older students, said Jamie Merisotis, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, the other co-sponsor.

“People over the age of 40 are going back to college to be retrained,” he said. “Lifelong learning is becoming a reality for Americans.”

Two-thirds of the older students are women, and some have returned to school after a divorce or after their children get older, giving them time to develop a career, he said.

Others are just looking for a career change or are trying to keep up with an increasingly competitive marketplace.

In fact, more and more students are studying at corporate universities. There were about 400 of these employer-sponsored schools in the 1970s; now there are more than 1,000.

“Our global competitiveness is requiring us to be much more competitive,” Merisotis said. “Those factors are really driving people’s need to get post-secondary education and training.”

Others findings:

Students aged 40 and over make up 10 percent of undergraduates, 22 percent of graduate students and 6 percent of students in medical, law or other professional programs.

Most 40-plus students - 79 percent - are part-time. More than half of the part-time students attend two-year public schools.

Most older undergraduates are white (82 percent) and married (59 percent).

57 percent of 40-plus undergraduates work at least 30 hours per week, compared to 25 percent of students aged 18 to 24. Older students work an average of 38 hours per week.

Older students do better, with 44 percent reporting “mostly A’s” in their coursework (compared with 9 percent of 18- to 24-year olds), but it takes them longer to finish.

Census data show that 64 percent of 18-to 24-year-olds with degrees finish by four years and 99 percent finish by six years. By comparison, 39 percent of students aged 45 to 54 finish in four years.