Well, you missed out on a lucrative lawsuit there if you're in the US. An interviewer telling someone they're not going to be hired because they're over 40 (or even just because they're not young enough, when they are over 40) is legally equivalent to telling them they're not going to be hired because they're black or Jewish.
Then the question was, do you want to be the guy who calls that out? Trying to get a job...
I don't think the outcome is a sure thing, in that case I wanted to do / say something but I felt like it was the applicant's call. Not an easy decision.
I respected his choice to just move on, still burns me up a little, but his call IMO.
My wife is friendly pursuing her bachelor’s and it is clear to both of us that universities are really just tolerant of non-traditional students. You won’t be treated poorly, but all of the infrastructure, tools, class progression, etc, is constructed around post-Highschool young adults.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to a community college, but I suspect they’re slightly better.
My wife was in grad school and pregnant. Some of the instructors seemed completely confused on how to handle things. Others seemed to handle it in stride.
It's like there's an expectation that "you're relatively poor, young" and some other expectations that when that's not the case the system starts to fall apart.
Despite being a terrible student when I was younger, I found had a great time learning, and I've really enjoyed my job ever since.
I found myself in a strange position though, lots of services offered benefits to students, discounts, internships, storage / compute time etc. I was not enrolled in a traditional university (although they were administering it), and so I didn't qualify, for much of any of those kinds of offers. Most of the systems in place thought of students as a typical 4 year university student and frankly ... younger. One internship I applied to did not seem to clearly indicate they were only really interested in younger, and more traditional students until the second interview.
Some of these rules I get, they don't want someone abusing their free / discounts for other reasons and they have systems in place for dealing with traditional students.
With people changing jobs and seemingly continued potential for the need for job market retraining and related disruption and etc ... it feels like it's time to make some adjustments as far as what a "student" is and so on.