Graduating with undergraduate degree at 24. Bad for career?

Long story short:
I've taken a gap year since leaving school and might now take another one to go to college and then hopefully get into a better uni. My birthday is in march, so that means I will start at 20 and finish at 24.
I want to study economics with politics or philosophy. Will taking longer than most people mess up my career?

I would like to either work for NGO's or in business. I don't have a set profession in mind, though.
I've also considered International Relations/politics, but I'm wondering if I would need something to make me more employable considering I'll be older than most when I graduate - if I decide to go next year. That's probably my main worry, I guess.

Graduating at 24 won't make any difference at all. It's 3 years out of a 40-50 year career.

Surely it depends on if you've had work experience prior to graduation? Being 24 and never having had a job looks pretty bad, regardless of your grades (not saying this is relevant to OP but it is to some people)

Surely it depends on if you've had work experience prior to graduation? Being 24 and never having had a job looks pretty bad, regardless of your grades (not saying this is relevant to OP but it is to some people)

But it looks much less bad at 20 imo. If you've got to beyond the normal university graduation age, that's when it really starts to look bad. Before that it could be attributed to the person being REALLY focused on their studies.

Surely it depends on if you've had work experience prior to graduation? Being 24 and never having had a job looks pretty bad, regardless of your grades (not saying this is relevant to OP but it is to some people)

But it looks much less bad at 20 imo. If you've got to beyond the normal university graduation age, that's when it really starts to look bad. Before that it could be attributed to the person being REALLY focused on their studies.

Long story short:
I've taken a gap year since leaving school and might now take another one to go to college and then hopefully get into a better uni. My birthday is in march, so that means I will start at 20 and finish at 24.
I want to study economics with politics or philosophy. Will taking longer than most people mess up my career?

Have you ever considered that you have an awful lot of fixed (and negative) opinions on this subject, when you haven't actually been an employer?

How will anyone even know you are 24, not 23, or 22 or 21 - you don't put your date of birth on a job application and age discrimination is illegal anyway!

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be offensive. I'm just speaking from the perspective of someone who's barely ever worked and is 21 and is worried I'll never get a job if I graduate at 24, tbh. With regard to how they'd know - don't people generally put their secondary school education on their CV?

Say your birthday was in September then you would be 19 when starting uni, 20 if having done a gap year!

then if you did a 4 year programme with a placement year, you would be 24, turning 25 at the end of summer and merely a few weeks after starting a graduate programme in July / August, with some starting in September to give you the summer to have some fun.

You shouldn't have any problems with your career as long as you can show why you did what you did when you did it so being realistic.. how much of a better uni do you think you will get in to with going to college? Probably not much, and although people assume the best universities are the obvious ones like Oxford and Cambridge when actually some specialisms are at lower ranked universities. Advertising for example, huge industry worth billions yet the best course for advertising is at London College for Communication, part of the University of the Arts. Somewhere like this might be much more suited for you than somewhere elitist and stuffy like Oxford.

You mention Politics and Economics.. well in the political realm is a lot about public relations and political consultancy / strategic communications / crisis management whatnot. There is a revolving door between government and the PR industry. LCC offers a great course in public relations or over at Cardiff there is Journalism, Communications and Politics and this a great mix of how the media has so much power to influence the world - take the shootings in the last few days and how the aspect of live-streaming, not just uploading a video but actually inviting the internet to be with when something crazy like that happens can have a huge impact of tens of thousands of people marching in protest all over the world.

Cardiff offers modules such as:

Introduction to Government and also Political Thought and Political Science,
Representations
Influencing Public Policy,
War Politics and Propaganda,
Citizen Media
The Making and Shaping of News
Communicating Causes
Elections in the UK
Spin and Unspun: Public Relations and the News Media

Cardiff is ranked 35th nothing spectacular but a good university and would open doors, so no point fighting for a better uni when you can do so well in other places as I have tried to demonstrate. The advertising course at LCC for example could have you working for Ogilvy & Mather in London and then on to New York! They recognise the prestige of the advertising course at LCC within the advertising industry.

The degree from Cardiff could get into newspapers, government, PR, and also within financial services so to build experience in all these areas would make your profile stronger and perspective on all of these collaborating industries.

This is so much more interesting and modern to studying PPE which has created a robotic governing class.

So this is to go to show that if you research and think of a clever way to start your career it could be really interesting! Entirely up to you but really doing your research might really help and finding out what you can do with what you've got so far would be good and how you can work with that.

Anything else just ask.

Thanks a lot for your advice. That does sound like a really interesting course but unfortunately I'm limited to Scottish unis for financial reasons.

I have a place at aberdeen but I would like to either go to Glasgow or St Andrews. Are people able to work in business/for NGO's with politics/IR degrees?

Aberdeen is a great university, which it's ancient historical buildings, it would be more popular if it wasn't so tucked up in the furthest corner of the country. IR involves understanding the complex dynamics of countries, central to this is international economics, trade and diplomacy so multi-national companies would be interested such as the energy companies which is a huge industry in Aberdeen.

Aberdeen University offers IR joint with Economics which would be good for crossing between business and government roles.