The online application, for a role at a well-known household-goods maker, would not submit without the exact dates the candidate had attended college. Not graduating year — attendance dates. The candidate’s reading of it was blunt: it is a tidy way to work out roughly how old someone is, and therefore to quietly decline the ones past a certain age.
They ran it past a friend in HR, expecting to be told they were overthinking it. The friend’s answer: “yeah, they’re just trying to figure out how old you are.” The form asks for dates, and the form is not interested in the month you graduated so much as the years you were there.