Many graduate students are discovering that life really begins after age 30
BY MIRIAM HORN

Fresh out of the University of California–Berkeley with a degree in economics, Arthur Sorrell spent the 1980s trading securities as an assistant vice president of a Los Angeles bank. Then he quit. He had no clear idea what he would do next but knew he wanted work that he could believe in passionately. Sorrell moved back to his hometown of San Francisco and for three years volunteered as music director at a children's summer camp and as an assistant at a free medical clinic. He found that ''having an impact on kids and people in need was much more potent than making a $50 million trade.'' Today, at age 38, he is a fourth-year medical student at the University of California–San Francisco.

Sorrell is one of a growing number of people who attend graduate school after age 30. In 1995, about a quarter of the 297,000 students enrolled in medical and law schools and more than half of the 1.7 million working toward master's degrees and Ph.D.'s were 30 or older. Analyst Jacqueline King of the American Council on Education describes the shift as part of the ''democratization'' of graduate education. What was once a ''small activity, a blue-blood thing,'' has broadened, she says. While some go to graduate school later in life because employers demand advanced degrees, a great many do so because they realize there is something different or deeper that they want to do and they need more education to accomplish their new goals.

Hunger. Whether they enroll to acquire skills necessary to become more effective in their chosen fields or, like Sorrell, want to better align their work lives with their values, nearly all older students feel more focused and certain of what they want from graduate school than many of their younger classmates. John McCray-Goldsmith, who earned an M.B.A. from the University of California–Berkeley in 1997 after years spent developing housing in the Third World, says, ''At B-school, I had the experience on which to hang the theoretical stuff. And I was really hungry for the tools.''

For a number of over-30s, pursuing a graduate degree is a step toward fulfilling a dream once set aside. Silas Crawford had always wanted to be a lawyer, but when he graduated in 1982 from the University of Alabama with a degree in public relations, his ROTC commitment required that he spend three years in the Army. When he left the service, he needed steady income, so he took a job managing a jewelry store. Later, he opened a gift shop in Montgomery, Ala., with his sister. When he married a doctor in 1993, he faced what he calls a '' `what now?' moment'' that moved him to revive the aspirations of his youth. ''I didn't want to have to tell my kids `I could have been [a lawyer]' and then go to my grave bitter.'' At 37, he is back at the University of Alabama, as a third-year law student.

Awakening. Others enter graduate school relatively late because they took a long time to figure out what they wanted to do. Coby Dolan, 30, graduated from Duke University in 1989 with a degree in political science and went to work for a Boston bank setting up private trusts. After two years, he quit and traveled around the country hoping to sort out his life. In a bookstore in San Francisco, he found a volume on environmental careers, which he took on a backpacking trip. While savoring the beauty of California's Yosemite Falls, he decided that the environment was what really mattered to him.

Dolan took a job with an Atlanta company contracted to assess toxic-waste sites for the Environmental Protection Agency. Several years later, while he was working as an aide to a member of the Florida State Legislature, he decided that the best way he could improve the environment was through policy making, and for that, he believed, he needed a law degree. He is now enrolled as a second-year student at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Ore.

All of these late bloomers encountered difficulties on their zigzag paths. For some, the initial hurdle was getting into graduate school. While many institutions see a student's life experience as an asset in the classroom, others favor younger students who will have more years in which to use their degrees. When Sorrell applied to medical school, one interviewer asked: ''Why should we make an investment in you, who have 10 years less to give to the profession?''

Some colleges and universities are simply unused to dealing with older students. When Martha Christian, 45, applied to architecture school after spending two decades as a theatrical costumer, she was stunned when University of Southern California admissions officers began haggling over whether they would transfer her English 101 credits earned some 20 years earlier at the University of North Carolina. She ended up enrolling at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, from which she graduated this year.

Adjusting. For a person who arrives on campus already accomplished in a profession and used to a big office, a parking space, and a secretary, becoming a student can be a blow to their ego and sense of identity. Counseling psychologist Nancy Schlossberg, coauthor of Going to Plan B, a book about what people do with their lives when their original hopes and expectations fail to materialize, has found that most older graduate students don't anticipate the ''disconcerting change of status. Suddenly they have to wait by the professor's door hoping to be invited to sit down; they are called by their first name but have to address faculty members by their title. I have seen people drop out who felt they were being infantilized and couldn't take it.'' The change in status, adds Schlossberg, is usually accompanied by a loss of income and a sharp increase in expenses at a time in life when people have grown accustomed to an ''adult'' standard of living.

Despite these problems, most older students–and those scholars who study them–believe that, on balance, their age and experience give them an advantage over younger classmates. After spending years in the theater, says Christian, she knew ''how to play the system, identify and align myself with important faculty, make myself noticed.'' For a time, she was the graduate assistant to the head of her architecture school. Most also say they experience less stress than their classmates because grades are not their overriding concern.

Older students say that their graduate work is enhanced by their prior experiences. ''I've done a lot of retrofitting, applying what I've learned now to what I did in the past,'' says Dolan, the environmental lawyer to be. ''I run policy situations through my head, situations I actually dealt with and anticipate dealing with in the future.'' Medical student Sorrell says that his experience in the high-stress financial world makes him better able to handle intense encounters with patients and their families and senior medical staff.

They may arrive with a greater sense of direction, but older students are as susceptible as younger ones to having their vision and goals transformed by school. McCray-Goldsmith, 37, enrolled at Berkeley's Haas School because his efforts to develop housing in the Third World increasingly demanded an expertise he lacked in leveraging and managing money. By the time he graduated, however, he had decided to become a management associate at Charles Schwab & Co. in San Francisco. He wanted a life outside of work, he explains, and more income to support his two children. He also found Schwab to be a firm with values fitting his own. He keeps his hand in charitable work, in part by volunteering with his church in low-income communities.

Dan Sullivan, associate director of student services at the Haas school, often sees older students arrive with a plan to go back to the nonprofit world, only to see their aspirations altered by the business school culture. ''Socialization is a powerful thing,'' says Sullivan.

Not everyone, of course, changes his mind. For Silas Crawford, the experience at law school simply confirmed a longtime desire to do public-interest work. During a summer internship with the American Civil Liberties Union, he worked with a lawyer who represented a salesman of Confederate memorabilia being barred from participating in a business fair at a local public high school. Arranging their first meeting, Crawford, an African-American, told the client he would have no problem spotting his advocate: ''I'm the one who looks least likely to be on your side.''

Most older graduate students find that their return to the classroom opens up new, even unexpected, possibilities. Like generations of Americans before them, they are taking advantage of a distinctive feature of this nation: the opportunity to make a fresh start.