I’d much rather employ a 50-year-old recent graduate than a 21-year-old recent graduate. There are lots of reasons for this, not least all the extra life experience and the hard evidence of being able to make major decisions and follow through with a difficult challenge.

No employer expects a new graduate employer to stay with them more than a few years anyway, so I can’t see you’d be disadvantaged there either

Old man here… The first online bubble was probably the dot.com bubble of the late 90s, when lots of people first went “This internet thing is amazing and we’re all going to make millions!” I remember boo.com being one of the first high-profile crashes, but pretty soon a lot of that first wave of internet retail businesses folded, with notable exceptions like Amazon, of course.