During the 1980s, Irene Cooper worked as a short-order cook, prep cook, bartender and waitress at restaurants across Texas and California. She earned an associates degree from the California Culinary Academy, and for a brief period of time, opened and managed a restaurant with her husband in Nebraska.

But when Cooper decided to go back to the workforce after raising her two daughters — now ages 12 and 16 — she ran into a serious problem.

All of her work experience was in the culinary field and she did not want to go back into that.

“It didn’t feel right going back into the culinary world after my 40th birthday,” said Cooper. She knew she’d need a new set of skills if she was going to find a job that suited her in today’s workforce. And that meant going back to school, she said.

Cooper was 42 when she signed up for her first class at Central Oregon Community College in 2008. This summer, she’ll be walking across the stage at Oregon State University-Cascades Campus’ graduation ceremony to pick up a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies and be one step closer to her goal of being a professor.

Almost 1 of 5 students at Central Oregon’s two publicly funded institutions of higher learning is 40 or older, according to the schools’ admission departments.

And according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, it’s projected that every post-secondary institution in the country will start to look this way by 2020 as colleges become inundated with older students who are looking to advance in their current careers, switch careers entirely or mark something off of their life’s to-do list.

“It was like a human wave,” said Cooper, who saw the influx of older college students like herself who have enrolled at COCC and OSU-Cascades during the five years she’s been in school. “In one of my English classes, (which has 25 students) there are probably four of us who are over 40.”

The wave

Stephen Ritter went to college immediately after he graduated from high school. But he dropped out after a couple of semesters because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Ritter figured the time off would give him a chance to figure it out.

“I just wanted to see the different aspects of what was out there and what I wanted to get into,” the 45-year-old said.

In the meantime, Ritter has worked various jobs at restaurants and in retail. He’s sold cars, worked as a mall security guard and spent seven years on the open road as a long-haul truck driver. He took this last job because he could save enough money to start college in the fall of 2008.

He is now just two semesters away from getting a bachelor’s degree in business administration from OSU-Cascades. He hopes to use this education and his work in every facet of the retail industry to get a job in business development or marketing at a company like Nike or GE.

People who are 40 and older made up about 19 percent of OSU-Cascades’ student body during the 2011-12 school year, said Jane Reynolds, the college’s director of enrollment services and student success. Many of these students started taking courses at college but never finished their degrees.

“They’re midcareer and definitely see the value of getting their degree,” she said, adding they’re going back to school to move up in their careers.

They’re also going back to school because of the recession, she said. Many of OSU-Cascades’ older students had worked in fields like construction that all but disappeared when the economy went south.

“We all of a sudden had a lot more students when the recession came,” she said. Though students in their 30s have seen the biggest increase in post-recession enrollment, she said, students in their 40s and older were not that far behind.

COCC Director of College Relations Ron Paradis said his school, which is where about 40 percent of OSU-Cacades students come from, reported a similar boost in enrollment when it went from having 7,090 credit earning students in the 2006-07 school year to having 11,334 students this school year.

As with OSU-Cascades, Paradis said people in their late 20s and early 30s were the fastest growing number of students at his college in the post-recession enrollment boom. But people 40 or older weren’t that far behind, he said, and now make up 17.5 percent of the COCC’s student body.

“We’re already almost there,” Paradis said when asked about the National Center for Education Statistics’ prediction that 19.1 percent of all students in a post-secondary program will be 35 or older by 2020. “That would not be a real big change for us (when it comes.)”

Help in numbers

Eugenia Osborne, 55, has raised five daughters and is the proud grandmother of four girls and two boys. But up until her mid-40s, there was something she wanted to do but never did: go to college and get a four-year degree.

“When I finally worked up the nerve (to go to college), I just went for it,” said Osborne, who was 47 when she started school and will earn a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies from OSU-Cascades this summer.

Living with her oldest daughter and two granddaughters who are 11 and 15, Osborne said she has some time to study in the afternoons when everyone is at school or work. Even with this schedule, Osborne says she gets most of her work done early in the morning when the family is asleep.

“It helps that I’m an early riser,” she joked.

It also helps that Osborne’s daughter and granddaughters are supportive of her efforts in going back to school. She said she pays back their support with a little bit of inspiration, noting that “if Granny can do it, anybody can,” and they no longer have an excuse to not get a college degree.

But even with this help and determination, Osborne said, it hasn’t been easy for to go back to school at her age.

“There were moments when I didn’t think it was going to happen,” Osborne said. “But then I’ve had help from other students who have encouraged me to go forward and have held me accountable.”

Osborne said many of those students have been older — maybe not as old as she is, but still older than the traditional college student — who might have families and careers to manage while working on their degrees. Cooper, the former restaurant worker who went back to school when she was 42 years old, said she’s also found some support from the fact that 72 percent of OSU-Cascades’ students are older than 25.

“Even people who are younger than we are have stuff besides school going on in their lives,” she said. “You would actually be in a minority if you were here and just a student” without a family or a full-time job.