My pal Brian Gleason and I are old. Not “senior citizen discount old,” and certainly not “Donald Gerth old,” but at 31 and 26 respectively, we’re pushing (or have pushed) gradually past a few statistical averages we weren’t looking forward to passing.

For example, the university’s Office of Institutional Research indicates the average Sacramento State undergraduate is 24 years old. Even more telling is the figure that tells us the median age of all Sac State students is 23. If you look at a graph of students’ age distribution, Brian and I are literally over the hill. It doesn’t make us smile.

“Age ain’t nothing but a number,” I told Brian one evening as we commiserated over cheap beer, Rogaine, Viagra and a Britney Spears DVD. “You’re only as old as you feel.”

But while older students may look at the OIR data and feel woefully outnumbered, a glance at the bigger picture proves an interesting phenomenon to which Brian and I and perhaps thousands of others on this campus belong–that is, Sac State as the “last stop” school for the aged and procrastinated.

Speaking for myself, who has attended more colleges than movies in the last ten years, I woke up one morning in 2001 with the realization that I couldn’t survive an eternal $12/hr existence in the flat-lining office world of phone banks and filing cabinets. Working two jobs was getting tiresome. It was obvious that a change had to be made, and that day I decided to go back to school.

That’s not an uncommon path among Sac State students.

“I studied Design and English at CSU Chico in the early ’90s,” Brian told me recently. “I left with units pending and worked at a few tech jobs in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz.

“When I relocated to Sacramento to be with my girlfriend (who Brian recently married, by the way), I renewed my calling to become a teacher. But I needed to complete requisite coursework first.”

So Brian did what nearly 10,000 students have done in the last three years–he transferred to Sac State. In doing so, he joined a swelling demographic that dwarfs similar groupings at other institutions; students over age 24 account for more than a quarter of the 22,000 undergraduates who attend Sac State. Compare this figure to 18 percent at San Diego State, or 16 percent at Chico State. Additionally, when it comes to undergraduates ages 30 and up, Sac State handles twice as many students as Chico State.

In other words, this is the conveniently located school for the ambitious among us who realize they’re not getting any younger.

“It was pure logistics,” Brian said of his decision to attend Sac State. “My previous CSU units had better transfer potential here, we live close by and it is relatively affordable.”

Of course, “logistics” are much of what contributes to Sac State’s lack of community–a school to which 20- and 30-something students can commute between shifts at the office or the restaurant or wherever they can find a flexible boss and a living wage.

But it’s the personalities that change.

“For me, Sac State and Chico are basically equivalent,” he said, conceding that while there are distinct differences between day-to-day campus life at each school, those differences mostly reflect the growth of his own perspective and goals.

Brian adds that evaluating the transition is “almost like comparing personal eras,” suggesting peoples’ ongoing bouts with reality are much less a chance to fight than they are a chance to adapt. Our social obligations change over the years, and aging tends to calcify commitments to maintain some type of personal order, as well.

Obviously, aging isn’t bad in and of itself, but as our biologies tend to attack our bodies with deadlines and ultimatums, our psychologies work in a similar way. It’s the metronomic ticking of our internal clocks’ second hands that keeps us up at night.

So we go back to school. Older. Wiser. Determined. Desperate.

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