DETROIT — Heidi Kassab remembers being 16 years old and sneaking into the corner office of the credit union where she worked.

"I remember sitting on the CEO's chair and saying: 'I'm going to be here someday.' "

That someday came relatively quickly. At 32, she became chief executive officer and president of Cornerstone Community Financial, Michigan's 25th largest credit union.

Corner offices aren't exactly hopping with 20-somethings, but the average age of chief executive officers in the United States is falling.

A survey Booz Allen Hamilton conducted among the nation's 2,500 largest publicly traded companies shows that the average starting age of a chief executive fell from 50.4 in 1995 to 48.8 years old in 2001.

In the information technology field, the average age was 45.2 years old in 2001, and in telecommunications, it was 45.7 years that same year.

Some examples of the trend:

Julie Roehm, 36, of Rochester Hills, Mich., was a director of marketing communications at DaimlerChrysler before she became the head of advertising at Wal-Mart. The company fired her earlier this month amid allegations of her having an improper relationship with a subordinate and accepting gifts.

Michael Sessions became the youngest mayor in the United States when he was elected mayor of Hillsdale, Mich., at age 18 in 2005.

The trend has experts asking how much age matters when hiring someone for a top job. A young person might be more up on emerging technologies and pop culture. Also, younger workers are thought to have more drive and be more willing to take risks.

On the flip side, they often lack the experience and wisdom that comes with failure, experts say.

"If the dot-com world proved anything, it proved that brains and ambition have to cross eventually with experience," said Chuck Wardell, managing director at the world's largest executive search firm, Korn/Ferry International.

When push comes to shove, experience trumps youth, Wardell said. Failure, he argues, is more likely to happen when a leader misjudges the culture of a corporation, and it takes years of experience and self-knowledge to understand those subtleties.

That appears to have been the problem with Roehm at Wal-Mart. She reportedly painted the gray walls in her office chartreuse. At Chrysler, she was known for her edgy approach to advertising and for having signed up the Dodge brand to support the Lingerie Bowl, the Super Bowl event that had women playing football in lingerie.

Eventually, Dodge backed out of the event. But that aggressive approach probably didn't go over well with Wal-Mart executives.

Some people aren't so quick to criticize youth.

"Some people are very savvy and mature 36-year-olds," said Jeff DeGraff, associate clinical professor of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

He should know. At 26, he was a senior executive at Domino's Pizza, and he was on the board of advisers at Apple when he was 29.

DeGraff said there is a place for edgy leaders and they tend to be found at cutting-edge companies like Apple, eBay and Google.

Bob Palmer, who became president of Plante and Moran Financial Services at age 36, argues that getting to the top quickly has its challenges.

"Being younger, you have a credibility issue maybe more than someone who is more experienced," said Palmer, now 46.

Can young leaders come back from failure?

DeGraff says a comeback depends more on resiliency rather than just age.

"I don't think age has much to do with coming back from failure," DeGraff said. "Some leaders can handle failure better than others."