There are cases in which older coursework may be discounted, but most of these relate to individual programs.

*A graduate program, for instance, might require that foreign language courses be no older than 5 years. (The principle is that if a person hasn’t done anything with the language in 5 years, she/he probably doesn’t know it well enough for study purposes.)

*An accounting degree might require that students have taken all their major classes within the past 7 years. (A school wouldn’t want to give a degree to someone who had taken her/his accounting classes in 1950. Rules and technology have changed.)