GPA? Should I worry....
 

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.

First off, won't matter for regionals, especially that long ago. If you're looking at a regional career, you're good and can stop reading now.

For majors...

HS GPA is not at all a factor to the best of my knowledge.

Not having a four year degree will be a big factor. That will put in you in deep hole to begin with. In that case a very high HS GPA might possibly help you prove the point that you were good enough for college but had better things to do.

An associates will help a little, but without a four-year, you will need to really stand out in aviation and even then it will delay you.

For the majors I would guess new hires TODAY (not talking about the new-hire class of 1985) who don't have degrees make up less than 10% and for the best jobs probably about 0-2%. And those folks are mostly connected or diverse.

I figured about the no 4 year degree. Currently my business is for sale and I am teaching on the side. My plan was once the business sells to start taking classes to work towards the 4 year degree knowing I will probably need at least 1.5 years as a CFI, then a couple years at a Regional. Worst case, if I dont get the 4 year, and majors have not lowered their standard work as a Regional CA and retire at 65 from that and go to corporate.

I just wanted to make sure my 18 year old self wasnt going to hurt my 50 year old self

You're fine if you get a degree, nobody will care about HS that far back.