She looked like a good bet to beat the odds, but her first try at college, nearly 20 years ago, came up short.

From a tough, low-income neighborhood of Utica, N.Y., Catherine McNamara earned a scholarship to Northeastern University in Boston, but soon returned home. Her second attempt, at a nearby community college, ended when a car accident knocked her husband out of work.

Since then: two kids, scattered jobs, a move south. Life.

But on Saturday, McNamara will cross the stage at North Carolina Central University to collect her bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical sciences _ with a 3.98 GPA. Her path took her to five institutions in three states over 17 years and she earned a scholarship here in 2007.

An education, she said this week, "is the one thing you've earned for yourself absolutely nobody can take away from you." She expects to be bawling as her family watches commencement.

There's no such thing as a typical college student these days. Nearly a third of undergraduate college students are 25 or older. About 70 percent have at least one characteristic that makes them "non-traditional" to government statisticians, such as part-time enrollment, caring for dependents, or working full-time while enrolled.

Supposedly, the "traditional" college student is 18 to 24, attending one institution full-time for four years. But that ideal has been steadily sliding toward mythology for decades. A majority of students who finish a bachelor's degree attend multiple institutions along the way. Among older students, nearly half take eight years or longer.

What's unusual about McNamara isn't her winding journey, it's her ultimate success. No country gives students more second chances to enroll in college than the United States. But where it falls short is helping non-traditional students complete a credential.

"When you look at who succeeds in college," said Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit, "you realize that any departure from the traditional path ... has huge consequences to the likelihood of students succeeding."

Last week, Haycock's group, working with a giant consortium of state university systems, released some of the most comprehensive data ever collected tracking individual students along their often peripatetic paths through higher education.

Like many older students, McNamara's route included community colleges. In other surveys, roughly 80 percent of community college students say they hope eventually to finish a bachelor's degree. But the Education Trust data estimated under 10 percent succeed within 10 years.