I took four, most of that doing manual labour. Gave me lots of time to think about what I wanted my major to be, a decision I had no answer to at nineteen but had a good idea of at twenty-three. Definitely don't regret that delay.

I think you can start college pretty much at any age as long as you don't already have a degree. It's obviously a huge luxury to do so, but I think you're missing out on so much social and intellectual development if you do college now that it may be worth holding out for 3 years (or maybe more). I'm not saying that college now is completely worthless, but looking from the outside and listening to what students are saying, it seems severely diminished.

At some point you get too old and you outgrow your college peer group. I think 2 years is the most id recommend. College is like 30% study 30% social and 40% getting the initial experience that you can use to start that first job.

I finished my degree after returning from an enlistment, and was about 8-10 years older than the typical "college-aged" peer group. Though ages tended to skew older in the ECE department I attended, with at least a quarter of the EE majors being established over-30 professionals and veterans finishing their own degrees.

Variety in age in socialization is a healthy thing, and I feel cramming entire cohorts into a 24-month bloc isn't particularly amenable to how we've evolved.

Your experience isn’t likely common. Most people I went to college with at university were under the age of 25. The overwhelming majority so. I graduated at 23 and was consistently the oldest or tied for oldest in many of my classes. Outside of community college or graduate programs - people age 26+ are very uncommon.

You also spent enlistment time in a similar to college setting for the social aspects anyway, so you would be less impacted by the lack of it in actual college.

This doesn't pass the smell test to me. Plenty of seniors were friends with freshman and sophomores at my university. Maybe it's a bit rare to see an outgoing senior hanging out with a fresh out of high school freshman but less extreme examples were super common.

I just remember that there were some out of military guys in our program and they never really connected with the other under grads. They had more in common with grad students so perhaps they found more friends amongst that group.