Thanks for reading. Part of it came from watching my own mother's struggles to return to the workforce in higher education after she got her PhD. Many universities don't want to tenure track you if you start too late (in her case, early 50s). They tend to want late 20s through early 40s at the latest. Then on top of that you've got the generational differences and such.

The 50+ crunch is not something they tell you about in college or anywhere, really. But it is there.