The Guardian

We need to let people study later in life. Ask my dad | Gaby Hinsliff

Not everyone knows what they want to do at 18. So why has the mature student become a dying breed?
Illustration by Matt Kenyon.

This September, one of my oldest friends is going back to school. Three decades on from her last essay crisis, she’ll be back in the land of freshers’ pub crawls and student railcards, in pursuit of a new career that we didn’t even know existed in our 20s. And listening to her talk about summer reading lists, I am seized with an unexpectedly sharp stab of envy. Who doesn’t occasionally dream of turning back the clock and starting over? It should never be too late to experiment with something new, or to unwind decisions blindly made decades

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