international house: I'm currently in college and like most of my classmates I never considered doing anything else, mostly because it was what I assumed everyone does after high school. After meeting many international students (I dormed in an international house my freshman year) I began to see that many of them were older than most US college students. From what I have been reading, many EU students don't graduate university until 25 or 26, while US students graduate around 21/22, and in the summers are either interning somewhere or working. Why such an age difference? Is this why international students perceive US citizens as too capitalistic and fast paced? I don't understand why things seem to be so rushed in our schooling system. Of course I hear stories of a people taking a semester off, but I don't know anyone who takes a gap year or starts to work straight out of highschool. So my question is how do international students perceive US students? and why the big age difference in graduating from university? I don't see anything wrong with taking time off school to discover what you may or may not be interested in, it makes a lot more sense to do that then stumble through college changing your major 2 to 3 times (the average # changes for US students).|||any student who is studying abroad is likely to be older. It is of course more of a big deal moving away from your country when you are very young. maybe they are studying postgrad In the UK too, the only american students we see are older ones, many of them paying through the teeth, studying a masters here for one year, just so that they can have oxford or cambridge on their CV