Originally Posted by
Never2Late
I see a lot of people talking about GPA's when it comes to applying at an airline. My situation is I am back to flying after 20+ year break, got my commercial, CFI, CFII all in the last 12 months. My high school GPA (back in the late 80's) was 2.8 (if I remember correctly), went to a state college for a 1.5 years (due to being hard to get classes, I only ended up with MAYBE 30 credits) and GPA was "not good" (no clue what it was). Decided I wanted to get into Real Estate, got my Real Estate License at 21 then Real Estate Brokers License and have been pretty much self-employed since 21. After 2008, made a change and now have a contractors license. I have been very successful in business (all the way thru) which has now afforded me the $ to get back into flying. Would love to finish my working career as a pilot, should I worry about GPA's from that far back (should I even mention that I had "some college")? Will they care about my grades when I have a 25 years work history? My thinking was to take either online courses or courses at a local Junior College and use those grades to increase my blended GPA. I should say the low GPA is not due to lack of knowledge, rather lack of applying myself back then because I was alway focussed on "getting rich" so I would read every real estate investing book available and didnt care so much about "Western Civilization"
Low college GPA and no four year degree at all are not pluses, but neither will even slow you down from working at a regional. Nor will it likely hurt you ALL that much at a lower tier major. And even some of the legacies have eased up on their insistence that an applicant have a four year degree, although the overwhelming percentage of those they are now choosing to interview do at least have a degree.
My advice: See if you can't at least pick up an Associate's degree at your local community college along the way, then once you are at a regional use the long reserve time or long hotel stays to work on the rest of the credits for an online four year degree.
Major airline hiring is certainly increasing and the hiring criteria are getting less restrictive, but it never hurts to be as competitive as possible.